


Devil's Spoke

by jfk



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, M/M, Slavery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-19
Updated: 2012-06-23
Packaged: 2017-11-05 15:45:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 46,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/408167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jfk/pseuds/jfk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU in which youths from the poorer districts are sold to the Capitol as personal slaves. Peeta finds himself the unlucky Surplus of the victors of the previous Hunger Games: Cato and Clove.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Act 1, Scene 1

"Over there, boy!"   
  
Down the close, darkening lanes they sing their way to the station by the siding shed. the mix of them, the starving youths march down the hard lanes in blues and whites and pinks, all of their best, but still somehow cheap, with faces grim and gay.   
  
The girls, not in linens, who run with them pass out flowers. White, galbana lillies, so rare because nothing so beautiful has business here. the boys, stuck in their march, take them with humility, those memento moris, breat all stuck with wreath (as men's are, dead).   
  
The Capitol mock what the girls mean, who give them flowers, who they will never kiss again. And the others, the girls in dresses and colours, stare over one shoulder without saying a word. These boys are not their to kiss or keep, but Surplus to capacity and requirement.   
  
"Hurry, now! Lateness is not the virtue of a Valuable Asset."    
  
Dull porters watch them, and the casual tramps stare hard, sorry to miss them from their greyest daydreams. Unmoved, signals nod, the Capitol women in their frocks and wigs begin to shout and tug and get the rabble in line.   
  
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, the youths lead out.  Somewhere in the seam, mothers listen for the train whistle, they mutter their goodbyes guility: and never hear to which front they are sent.   
  
At the head of the procession, a mockery in her lace and bows, Effie Trinket starts to speak. The boys stand to her left, silent, watching the girls who organise themselves quickly. The Peacekeepers at the end of the station watch hungrily, waiting for the first of them to fall out of the line, or sob for a parent, or sibling.   
  
"Now, now." Effie says, animatedly, so affected that her words are like a strange musical babble. "No family in the Capitol ever paid to see a Surplus cry." her word are unfeeling and unkind, but not a soul dares disagree. She folds her hands in her gloves and stares hard over the sorry lot. The weakest ones get nudged by friends, urged to stop their sobbing.   
  
It happens every year, the custom. The games are for all of the Districts to see, even the rich ones, the power of the Capitol. This is different: it is theft of the youth, a slave-trade. It keeps families fed, they argue, how unjust can it be?   
  
Peeta stands in the second row, alone. In the satchel at his side, there is a tiny piece of stale bread, and some cheese, as a parting gift. It means little from the family that's selling him. It means the world to a Surplus.   
  
In outline Districts, those who cannot make a living have few options. There's always a tesserae, but it provides little, and getting reaped is death in all certainty.   
  
The other custom is submitting a youth, above the ages of sixteen to become a Surplus to a rich family. There's no telling to where one might be sent: there's always the Capitol, for the very lucky, pretty things. Or District's 1 or 2, depending on the skills of the Surplus, or the favour of the family.   
  
A Valuable Asset, as Effie is quick to remind them, will get the best home, and the nicest family. Unworthy Surpluses are subject to beatings, starvation, neglect. Peeta knows, just like the rest of them, that it isn't skill that gets you a good home. It's luck. Appeal to the right family, and you will be fed and watered and cared for.   
  
A Surplus is bought by an initial cost, and then weekly payments, so meaningless to the families that own them with all of their wealth. The money gets sent home, and is the only reminder of these forgotten children.    
  
"The register will begin in a moment." Effie babbles, excitedly. she claps her hands in this parody of a dance. "Good luck to you, Surpluses of District 12." Her voice is loud and strong now, this monotone little speech from her own home. "An obedient Surplus is a Valuable Asset. Good luck to you  _all._ "    
  
If Peeta could breathe, he would vomit. A V _aluable Asset_ , indeed, he thinks.  How lucky he will be if somebody in the Capitol fancies owning him, and having him as property. It's dehumanising, they know, but nobody seems to care.   
  
The crowd lurches forward, along with Peeta's stomach, still unsettled. A single line, one on each side, runs through a set of  Rendering Officers, who seal each Surplus' hand with a scorch mark, detailing to which District they'll be sent. It's very rarely outside of 1, or 2, or the Capitol. In 4, however, it's supposed to be much better for Surpluses. Treated better, and less like slaves, or furniture. It's typically worse if you belong to a Career house.   
  
In a flash, Peeta is standing between the two of them. He's rendered mute, staring at their faces, hoping for some kind of sympathy, but none is ever found.  They remove a very small sample of blood that makes him pale, testing it for anything contagious or work-hindering, before selecting the appropriate District to brand him with. The moment seems to last forever as the two dispute quietly.   
  
The Capitol? Peeta thinks about their garish fashions, of their wigs and shoes and clothes. They keep Surpluses in collars, there, as another reminder of how the Capitol dominate. He knows he doesn't want to be sent there, so far away, too far away to even remember. It's because of them that this custom is set into place, along with the Games, too barbaric and demonic to be humane. Peeta will not go with them if they sent him to the Capitol. He will fight.   
  
District 1? Luxurious, certainly, with most families wealthy and prosperous. They wouldn't have so much use for Peeta there, however: he isn't good at seeing or cleaning or most household tasks, which makes his value to District 1 decrease slightly. He wouldn't mind being sent there, because it;s a step-up from the Capitol, and there are no customs about 'collaring' Surpluses, or even restricting their movement. Surpluses in District 1 can move about as they please, which is a rarity.   
  
Naturally, District 2 isn't like that. Collaring is optional, but looked upon as a fashion. It is, after all, the District most favoured by the Capitol. hey'd have a use for him there, mining and masonry, as Peeta is strong, and he can handle himself well enough. Laws on Surpluses are harsh: owners are encouraged to beat their Surpluses or at the very least mark them (by branding or beating or any other means). It's not the Capitol, Peeta thinks, but it's just as scary.   
  
The thing is, they don't tell him. The scorch mark they slap on him is unintelligible, and Peeta is terrified, squawking for some explanation, by the time they load him onto the train.  It's too soon, he screams, he isn't ready, he isn't a Valuable Asset, he wants to go home, this shouldn't have happened to him--  
  
It's frowned upon to cry, Peeta knows that, but he's strong and it'll take a lot of blubbering to overlook him, even as a few tears escape and tear down his face, hot with shame. The rest of them, sat like slaves in rows of seats, try to ignore Peeta. some themselves, look on the verge of breaking, but remain unfeeling. It is a common fate. There's nothing special or upsetting about it, supposedly.   
  
With a sigh, the train pulls out of the station, and with it waves goodbye to all of the known world.  A girl besides Peeta, with mousy blonde hair and a strange accent rubs his arm.   
  
"I'm sorry this happened to you," She says, kindly. It's the first ounce of kindness Peeta has received in so long. He looks at her for a very long time before wiping at his eyes.   
  
"Me, too." He mumbles. For the both of them.   
  
\--  
  
On the final stretch home, the train pauses briefly at a station in some District.   
  
Either which way, Cato doesn't really know, or care. It's a waste anyway, the station nothing more than a shack on sandy paving.  The station-master is a lean, dark-skinned man who presents himself in a torn, ugly uniform. At his feet, children run around in the dust, chasing chickens, all barefoot and dirty. There's nothing for miles, and it's the only stop before home, another few hours or so. Most of the passengers take the time to stretch their legs, careful not to step out onto the station, as if the air is unbreathable.   
  
A crowd of wandering merchants, with greying beards and sad little faces hurry along, presented very rarely with the change to flog wares and rubbish, no doubt. They also wander without shoes, gasping at the passengers through the windows like dying travellers in search of sustenance. None is given. A dog remains, by a crowd of hens, brown fur, eyes rolling in purple sockets, watching the strange rabble. It's curious, Cato thinks, how desperate they can be.    
  
One particularly bold, toothless man begins to scrape at the window along, and, not unkindly, clove opens it. The rush of warm, fresh air is a blessing, but the harassment is not. Neither of them smile to him, so desperate, pushing the grey behind his ears and bowing his head.   
  
"Good afternoon, thank-you." He babbles, his hands shaking. The salesman tries to hold up his wares to the window, and out of a bad habit, Clove finds herself intrigued.   
  
The menagerie of little wooden animals is quite spectacular. Detailed, painstakingly-crafted wonders peep at her, a giraffe with outlines spots and bones, and two dull jewels as his eyes. The carving stars at her, proudly, a work of beauty in itself. Better still is the lion, with an actual mane made of fine scruff, combed and beautiful. It has a silk-pink tongue, the only silk around for miles owned by these people. The lion looks fierce and bold, one paw lifted up as if somehow to rule. His eyes, too, are made of stone, but prettier. Each detail is a fine, carved testament to the beauty of the culture.   
  
Clove can't really help herself. She reaches out and takes a hold of the lion, feeling it in her hands.   
  
"Pretty lion for the pretty lady, please." He continues, scratching at the whiskers on his face, staring up at clove hungrily, but not for want of food. She looks across to Cato, the salient, for some kind of guidance and he shakes his head, a tiny gesture, eyes tired with annoyance.   
  
"How much?" He gets out through his gritted teeth, making the majesty of the little lion seem crass. The opportunity seems rare, and the man grasps it, still leaning up through the carriage window, on his bare broken toes.   
  
"Good afternoon sir, thank-you." He says again, trying to be personable and patient. They both know the smile he wears is for courtesy, and not out of contentedness. Impatient, Cato repeats himself.   
  
"How much?" The man looks down at the lion and smiles again, toothless.   
  
"Ah, for your lady, please, I give it you for three pieces, please."   
  
They both know it's worth so much more, the lion, with it's proud scruff and silk tongue. it seems so raw, and powerful that Clove feels the need to refuse it. What would it mean away from the place she found it? Where would it sit in her antiques collection, the one that is unique filled with goods from the Capitol?   
  
Cato smirks and its back, shaking his head. "No." Desperate, the man nearly whimpers.   
  
"For your lady, please, I give it you cheaper." He begs, and looks at both of them for some kind of help. None is given. Clove looks away, at her feet, anywhere but him, or even Cato, who waves him off quickly with a stern look, before shutting the window again.   
  
They sit in the silence of the carriage. clove twirls the cool metal band on her finger. She doesn't like the way it sits or feels, but to take it off would put Cato in a temper, and he's already in a foul mood from the journey. The heat is only making it worse, stirring the mad blood. She keeps it on, and tries to tear her attention away from the fact, not even new, but still so novelty.  ' _Husband_ ' she thinks to herself, in a cold sweat. It terrifies her.   
  
"You shouldn't humour them." Cato warns her, his voice unfeeling. The words are hollow and ignorant, they make Clove feel hot with shame. "They're barbaric if you get too close." She laughs, a short, mirthless noise that sounds like being wounded.   
  
"How ironic." She comments, smirking. Cato is wrestling with himself not to smile, and instead leans back, bringing his hands into his lap and cracking his knuckles individually, just to be difficult. He knows how much Clove hates that.   
  
"Light of my life." He begins, tonelessly. "I'd much rather strangle you when we get  _home_." Clove laughs again, actually affected by his humour.   
  
"You know how I would hate to be an inconvenience to you,  _dear._ " She reaches over and pats his hand. Cato grins at her, a mixture of his annoyance and amusement and something devious, or lascivious.   
  
"I'm touched by your concern."  He says, rising from his seat, and moving towards the sliding door. Suddenly aware that she'll be alone when Cato leaves her, Clove sits up.   
  
"Where are you going?" Cato shrugs.   
  
"A walk." He says, carelessly. It's just like him to exclude Clove, to go out alone constantly and pretend it's not personal. It's almost funny, how much they cannot stand eachother's company, and how surely they love eachother, she thinks. Cato hasn't even joked about killing her since she fell pregnant.   
  
"Oh," Clove says in a small voice. "Don't hurry back." She says, in a sour tone. Cato lets out another huge grin.   
  
"I almost never do, darling." And he leaves her alone in the compartment.   
  
The day is only getting hotter here. A few of the other passengers have thrown out food to the platform, dark chocolates that they deemed inedible. The chickens, in their proud colours, dart out and peck them up before the children or the dog can even move.  Small crowds of salesmen try to flog other things, jewels and necklaces, and seeing them pass her window, Clove tries to appear invisible, turned away, holding her breath.   
  
After what feels like hours, but is in reality only a few minutes, a whistle is blown by the raggedy station-master and the passengers start to head back into their seats. With all of his arrogance, she knows that Cato will see no problem in taking his time. It's rare that somebody has the gall to argue with a victor, especially one so hot-blooded as him.   
  
Already, the train is started to pull away, and the salesmen are desperate now, chasing after the train, throwing jewels in the hopes that money will get thrown back.  They start calling out to Clove, and she blushes, feeling intruded upon, until the train is a distance from the station and at a high enough speed that she feels alone again.   
  
Cato joins her then, sitting in his seat, but leant forward. He presents her with something, the tiny lion from before, with all of it's scruff, and it's silk tongue.  She takes it, wary of the look in his eyes.   
  
"You didn't have to do that," She says, choosing her words very carefully. Cato shrugs.   
  
"It was nothing, really." He laughs. "The stupid bastard sold it to me for two pieces."  Clove feels herself grow heated with embarrassment and she shakes her head. Cato searches for her eyes but she gives none, and, God's bread, it makes him mad. "Jesus, Clove." He spits, furiously. "I shouldn't have bothered."   
  
Clove nods. "No, you shouldn't have."  they remain quiet for a few moments before Cato rises towards the door again.   
  
"You better not be like this when we're picking out a Surplus, Clove." He snaps, and then lets out a breath. "I need a drink."   
  
The train wheezes, headed straight home. It leaves her wondering, as she stares out at the desert wasteland, why she feels so angry with him. The lion sits on the sill, on it's side, unwanted.   
  
She cannot bear to look at it.  


	2. Act 1, Scene 2

It's unpopular, in the Capitol, to have a surplus from District 12. Why?   
  
Because they can't stand the sight of them.   
  
The train is silent as it turns a hard corner, and the passengers rock in unison, the same amount of momentum and misery and fear keeping them in motion. All of their faces look the same. The only thing distinguishing them is which stage of grief they have reached.   
  
Some are fixed in denial, shaking their heads, so certain that there's a mistake and they can turn the train around to loving parents who will come up with something else, who will do anything to keep them. The others, just moved on, are angry. They pull out their hair and kick their feet, faces beet red. As if the injustice is a personal offence.   
  
A few of them are bargaining, but most are depressed. At this stage, an hour into the journey, silent tears are shattering their resolves, their market value for the Capitol's eyes, or to whatever front they might be sent. Worst of all, they're just kids, taken out of school, and out of home and told to be invisible, told to exist for the betterment and benefit of a rich patron.   
  
Peeta isn't sure if he has reached acceptance. Things aren't okay. They will never be okay again. He has given up trying to work out to which front he'll be sent, the scorch marks hints at nothing, and the blank faces around the carriage do not utter a word of guidance either which way. at the front, a guard sits, nodding, winking to the lamp. Tunnels cast darkness over all of them.   
  
If he wanted anything, he might have taken the next train.   
  
Besides him, the mousy-haired girl has fallen into a drowse of some sort. That'd strange, for any Surplus, no matter how bold. This load, including Peeta, are all being sold for the first time. If Surpluses are returned or criminalised, they are sent for rendering and then sometimes rehoused.   
  
Other times, they're killed.   
  
He can't help but imagine who might afford the term for him. If he'll get a nice little family, with teenagers his age, or kind, older citizens who let him grow complacent and lazy. Peeta doesn't want to deal with any Careers, they're known to be the worst to live with, spoiled, hot-headed, and indulged to excess. At least, he thinks with some optimism, that if they send him to the Capitol, that won't be an issue.   
  
The only clue he has is to look at the other Surpluses. All of them have been trained, they know abut medications and housekeeping. The prettiest lot are always sent to the Capitol, and that would be a good factor to deduce with, but Peeta doesn't really know what constitutes as pretty. He has never had the time to care.   
  
 For a few hours, he falls into an agonised sleep, curled into sitting up. The dreams come four in a row, red rabbits, straw dogs, of how. he swears he can smell the stale bread of breakfast and Peeta's eyes open, cutting the delusion short, only to find the train slowing. Oh, Christ, crucified Christ, he thinks, this is the next step. Not arrival, he thinks thankfully, but close to it.   
  
Dissociation.   
  
They all bear marks from their previous lives, as free citizens of District 12. Surpluses are supposed to be sterile, when they are first sold there must be no indication or sympathies that elude to their previous lives. The 'equality' is often stressed, that all Surpluses should look the same and dress the same and remain invisible at all times, unless instructed otherwise by their patron, their owner. Obedience leads to being a Valuable Asset, as Effie would remind them. Valuable Assets do not get beaten.   
  
A sharp tone passes through the carriage that stirs them all into action. The guard rises and stand by the door, waiting until the train stops and the passengers lurch forward to give anybody eye contact. He shakes his head at them, the poor bastards, the ones that didn't escape the stipulations of love. Not a should in the carriage dares speak, but a few cough. Peeta wants to go back. he wants to crawl into the earth and bury himself where nobody will ever find him, and only go back when things are like they were before.   
  
"Up."  The guard says. As if rehearsed, or to some unheard music, they rise in unison. Preparation for the life ahead of them.   
  
The door to his side opens and pours white-hot light onto the youths inside. Peeta winces, blinded momentarily, and tries to focus on whatever is out there. Of course, they don't see anything, but a long, winding corridor, filled with the bleakness he feels. It's a temp joint. Not actually where they are being sent, but on the way.   
  
"Out." The guard isn't exactly a sparkling conversationalist. Peeta feels as if he might cry again, but fights it, trying to appear unaffected, like it will do him any good or somehow spite the guard. It doesn't work like that, he knows, but the thought helps him put on a brave face. The first few rows lead off and he follows, down the winding darkness, lit by blistering lamps.   
  
Peeta thinks this is the easier part. And he is right.   
  
But this part is by no means easy.   
  
They are divided up, again, into genders, and then into height order. Peeta isn't all that tall. He stands with five other boys, all of similar builds, in a tiny office-like room. They have been directed here, and they wait. Some of them, Peeta just about recognises, from the way they stand. All of them have undergone a radical change in face, going from happy, and free and relaxed to the saddest souls in Panem. The bitter produce of a harrowing sport.   
  
A monstrous woman comes in, her skin a sickly white, and her hair pink. Capitol fashions, Peeta thinks, and then something cold in his stomach drops.  _Capitol_ . He shakes his head furiously. No, it's a silly assumption, it's a mistake--  
  
She takes their weights, individually, and an approximate height. notes down other things, too, before the worst comes.   
  
"Strip." She commands them. The boys look nervously at eachother, for some kind of support, to band together and form a useless camaraderie. The woman becomes impatient quickly, and her voice becomes cutting. "Disrobe immediately."   
  
Peeta is the third boy to do so. They all peel away their shirts, with great hesitance, and then the shoes, scuffed by also shined with the spit of the honest worker, half-starved. Socks with so many holes in. And then trousers. She has left them with nothing to hide behind. They look to eachother, hands over their underwear, as it is the last thing they can hold on to. This is what the Capitol has reduced him to, Peeta thinks. From here on out he will be completely dehumanised.   
  
The woman speaks again. What? What has she said? The other boys look very nervous, and she starts to shout.   
  
"And the underwear." She snaps. "Quickly, now!"   
  
The thinnest boy whimpers.  Peeta has not ever in his life been shy about his body, having grown up with brothers, in a poor district. It's just flesh, after all, and everybody has it. Only, here, for the first time in his life, he actually feels ashamed and nervous, and he doesn't like that cold in his chest at all, not one bit. They look at eachother and nod, a silent promise that offers up no judgement. in near-unison, they undress completely, covering whatever remains shyly.   
  
"Arms out." The woman says. She has grown tired of arguing. In a second, all six of them are completely naked, holding their arms out at full length, with nothing to cover the dignity of unlucky boys, Surpluses, slaves.  Under her scrutiny, Peeta starts to feel struck with shyness. This is humiliating. Beyond that, to become a specimen, and for what? They aren't even told why, but subjected anyway.   
  
Her scrutiny is cold. This woman has yellow eyes that are so soulless, they make Peeta want to go and put a jumper on.  She seems to study each one of them individually, as if it pains her, before she nods, finishing up her writing of notes and turning back to them. The smile she manages seems to pain her.   
  
"Thank you for your co-operation."  She chirps to them, her voice stale. "An obedient Surplus is a Valuable Asset. Good luck to you _all_ ."   
  
Even Effie's bubbly shrieks were somehow more dulcet. They dress quickly, careful not to mention what had just happened, or meet eachother's eyes.  somebody else joins them, a lean man with brighter, more nauseating pink hair. His lips are green with lipstick and he looks like a jester.   
  
"--pass on all basic medical requirements, and can certainly be used as Surpluses..." In between the murmurings between them, all the boys hear her say it. "All but the third boy."  
  
They freeze, and the woman knows she is caught, faking a smile, leaving them alone whilst she chats to the Jester in the hall.  It leaves the boys with time to argue. At least if Peeta shouts it will cover the shame on his face. They never tell you about this when you are enlisted. The inconvenient details are left out until it's too late, and Peeta fears he'll be sat in the Capitol, starved, watching his patron eat with other garish, manic, pixie-like creatures.   
  
"Well, it isn't me." The thinnest one begins, pulling up his trousers hastily.  Another one whirls on him.   
  
"Cowshit, Ellis, it definitely was." The one named Ellis pales, and he looks around the boys to try and find one to accuse. he locks eyes on Peeta and mistakes him for an easy target.   
  
"What about him?" He asks, his tone weak and desperate. Peeta doesn't have the heart to shout at him: they have all been helpless today, and robbed of their humanity. The least he can do is humour him. They all know Peeta isn't the third boy. Or at least, they think they know.    
  
"How do we know he isn't the one they want?" All eyes turn to Peeta, and he looks back at them.   
  
(An unpleasant thought: the woman and the Jester know who the third boy is.)   
  
-  
  
It's just turning dark dark.   
  
The Mockingjays call to the passengers, still thrown in with eachother. most have retired to sleeping, in private rooms at the back of the train, and others remain in private spaces to read, or to enjoy the day's worth of exploration they have gathered up.  They still have anther hour or so, yet, before home, and nobody is in a hurry to be anywhere.   
  
Cato is aware that Clove has been sitting besides him for twenty-three minutes and forty-five seconds, approximately.  He's aware that she has ordered one drink: a tall glass of lemonade, and that she's only sipped it abut three times. Clove drinks very slowly, she always has done, liking to take her time and enjoy the flavour. Cato likes to demolish bottles very quickly, not fussed about taste, but about effects. He likes to soothe the ringing in his ears.   
  
It's only now she decides to speak.   
  
"Don't get drunk, dear. I'd hate for you to choke on your own vomit." For something so small and sweet-looking, she certainly knows how to make an entrance. He turns to her, his eyes swimming and red. She isn't afraid of him, even though all Cato has to do is lift an enormous arm and crush her. After all this time, they both suspect he doesn't have it in him.   
  
"I'm not drunk." Cato snaps to her, because he isn't.  Clove sighs.   
  
"Tipsy, then."   
  
"Comfortable." He hedges. Clove lets out a small laugh.   
  
"Nuance,  _darling_ ."  She takes another sip from her drink and watches him the entire time. Usually, she takes something stronger, and more vile, something like absinthe, just to be difficult. He watches her drink and thinks about kissing her, because, theoretically, he could do it, he could lean across and take her lips and then they really would be kissing, which isn't something they do, it's not like them. But he thinks about it often, and how good she looks in red, and how much he hates her, and loves her, and despises this predicament.   
  
Clove catches him looking and she softens, a little. Her eyes go warm with the hint of a smile and it's like she's searching in him for whatever had once been there. She feels unsure, because it's this, all of this; tenderness and caring and saying how she feels, that's so dangerous. It's easier to have Cato strangle her when they fuck, or anything like that, to remind them where they stand.   
  
Naturally, it doesn't last, and Cato fixes an arm around her waist, whispering to her.   
  
"You're getting fat, sweetheart." He tells her, which makes Clove chuckle. She talks back in the same quiet whisper. It usually strikes people as odd when the 'star-crossed loves of District 2' talk this way. Not that it matters.   
  
"And you're losing your hair, love." She counters him, with a nasty smile, and Cato goes to retaliate, caught up in the conversation. He leans in to talk but is interrupted.   
  
"Excuse me." A tall man taps the bar besides Clove. "Excuse me, might I just--" Suddenly aware that they are not alone, Cato recoils quickly, staring at the intruder, demanding an explanation. Seemingly oblivious, she takes another long drink before turning to the man demanding her attention, who is, for once, not Cato. Right away, she knows she doesn't recognise him.   
  
"Can I help you?" Clove says. She isn't in company she's used to, and Cato watches, in the know, as she becomes cold and distant. It's almost funny that the warmest she gets is around him, and that usually means threats and pulling teeth, but it doesn't move him to laugh. The stranger smiles to her.   
  
 "You're the victor for District 2." He says with such pride, like it's an accomplishment to know. It makes her feel at odds, remembering what they think she is, and being completely removed from it. Clove doesn't speak, she nods. "You won me a lot of money." He speaks again. "How are you?"  
  
She isn't unsure if it's to piss Cato off, or because it's nice to play a part in there 'normal' social customs, but Clove finds herself talking back before she can help it. Cato is so much more fun when he's jealous, his face goes all red and his jaw clenches.   
  
"I'm fine, thank you." She says, graciously, flicking out a wrist to fix her hair. It's easy to play people from rich districts, and especially the Capitol: they all think you're in love with them.   
  
"D'you still live in District 2, or have you moved to the Capitol?" His questions seem pretty innocent. Clove smiles, mostly for her own benefit, and wets her lips before speaking.   
  
"I kept the house in Victor's Village," She nearly says 'we', but avoids it, aware that it will shatter the whole illusion. Meanwhile, Cato, still as vicious and monstrous and enormous is sat to her other side, watching the stranger very carefully.   
  
"I haven't seen you on this trip before," he continues. "Do you not come often?" Clove dares a quick glance at Cato.   
  
"No," she says, absently. "I suppose I don't."  He sets an arm down on the bar and smiles at her.   
  
"So, let me buy you a drink." With those words, Clove knows something terrible is going to happen. She hates Cato for his smothering, never letting her fight her own battles, or defending herself, even back at the academy. All of this 'love' and caring makes her look weak and useless, and it makes him look even better. Clove isn't in the business of helping him at all, thank you very much.   
  
"No, thankyou." She says, her words clear. This guy doesn't take a hint, or even notice the glare from Cato. People are always unsure if they are still 'together'. Marriages don't mean a lot, they are usually political, and in aid of both parties rather than out of emotion. It isn't public knowledge that they sleep in the same bed (curled around respective weapons), or that Clove is pregnant.   
  
"You aren't still with your District partner, are you?" The stranger  ventures , totally unaware that Cato is right there and he's had enough to drink and he has a hell of a temper. Clove can sense him become tense and flushed with indignance. It is the only calm before the storm. She doesn't say anything . "So, come on." He  continues . "One drink. What will it be?"    
  
Clove straightens and purses her lips. "I said no, thank you." Because she hates repeating herself, and it shows the worst signs of an idiot if that is required. God, all she wants is to be home and forget about today, the poor man at the station and his proud little lion carving or Cato's drinking and his temper and the way he will no doubt take it out on whatever poor Surplus they happen to pick.   
  
"You're serious." The stranger shakes his head. "Your District's _freakshow_ -" Clove turns to him, angrily. Cato clears his throat, setting a hand on the bar, as if to warn the man.   
  
"Don't be rude." She chooses her words carefully, striving for  diplomacy . "I'm  flattered ," She says. "But I'm not  interested , thanks. I'm sure you can see yourself out." And with that, she picks up her lemonade, the one she had brought with  _Cato's money_ , with the hand that bears  _Cato's ring_  and faces ahead, eyes emotionless and vacant. He scoffs.   
  
"I was sure you'd be warmer than that." He drawls, with this horrible smirk. "You opened your lap to that hothead rather quick-" Cato stands, cracking his knuckles, staring the stranger down. He's a good head smaller than Cato, and not nearly as built. It's rare anybody is. Cocky, or stupid, he laughs.   
  
"I still can't believe  _that_  is your boyfriend."  He smiles.   
  
Clove turns back to her drink, trying to ignore the scene, trying to get home, because it's barely dark out and Cato is already bringing home wars. She doesn't want their home to be like this, all violence and temper, because she isn't strong enough to fight Cato on her own, and she isn't prepared to protect a child.    
  
A heavy thud turns her around, and she's alarmed to see the stranger kneeling on the ground, a small spray of blood on the carriage carpet. Cato turns to her,  seeing  her  shock .   
  
 "What are you doing?" Clove asks, in a tiny voice. He smiles at her, this sadistic, horrible smirk that distorted his face and makes it appear  grotesque  and inhuman. This is the Cato the arena and the Capitol and the world have seen. Everybody else has turned to watch.   
  
The stranger stands. He isn't up for very long.  


	3. Act 1, Scene 3

Peeta lays, once again naked, on a cold metal slab.

His eyes trace patterns on the ceiling, wondering what kind of place he has found himself in, more of a morgue than anything else. It’s cold enough here for the dead to sleep, no trouble, but Peeta, with whatever life remains within him, shivers violently. (He wishes he were to the wall, just a little.) At least he’s alone for now. Safe in his solitude, but he knows, not for long.

Scares are rife on his body. Burn marks from his carelessness and heavy-handedness go ladder his arms in shiny, colourful stripes, in different egress of aging or healing. They interrupt the light covering of blonde hair, but the colour is so light that it’s not very noticeable. Peeta has never had anybody look very close. His hands are moderately soft, and his face is quite fair from spending much of his time indoors.

To home, and the Seam, Peeta is lucky, damn lucky, and they can see it all over him. He walks straight and stands upright, not at all marred from working. Compared to many of the boys in his year, Peeta isn’t built badly, and he’s got enough food to get by, which is enviable by and standards, most of all in District 12. is pallor suggests that he works inside, and that’s the luckiest part of it.

Of course, to the Capitol, any of them, he seems starved and battered, all cuts and scrapes and bruises. His hair has no cut or style, simply flaxen. His walk is sloppy and he seems as if he would be clumsy, large hands and strong arms. A useless Surplus on all counts- treading far too loudly, eyes never cat down when they should be, shoulders always up, as if constantly bracing for a hit.

This is the only thing he looks to for comfort. In such a state, they’ll never take him to the Capitol. No. Surely not.

A door, somewhere to his left swings open and a buzzing surgeon enters, alongside a younger, nervous youth. Peeta doesn’t expect a Surplus surgeon to be too chirpy, but he’s proven wrong by the manic, powder-blue sprite that hums as he collects his instruments from the far desk. He walks –no, skips- over to Peeta’s side, passing his eyes over the view, seeming even a little bit bored.

“That state them in,” He tuts, shaking his head. “You have to wonder what goes on in these Districts.” Peeta feels something cold uncurl in his stomach and he bites his lip, trying to remain silent and motionless, and not let his emotions betray his resolve. “Backwards, all of them.” The surgeon tugs the youth over to his side and points down at Peeta with a gloved finger like he’s a cadaver already, and it’s not like they fight fair.

“Go on, boy, Administer the sedative.”

Oh Christ, oh, Jesus, what will they be doing that requires a sedative? The Capitol are always so reluctant to hand out drugs to poor Districts. To actually administer one gives him leave to panic, and imagine the horror that awaits him. He wants to scream, Peeta wants home badly, the smell of the sweet linens in the cupboard and the crack of the stale breakfast bread.

‘There’s a mistake!’ He wants to cry out desperately, mute against his better judgement. ‘Send me back!” He feels his hands curl into fists and his heart is trying to crack open his ribcage and spill out a ragged mess of blood on the sterile metal. Not here. Not now. Peeta is young, he’s too young and he’s scared, he wants to go back now.

None hear him. And even if they do, what should they care? Surplus Peeta, useless Peeta, payed for with money and just a commodity, there to serve a purpose and a master. He tries to move, but the surgeon forces him down with a hand and the boy is on him in a second, with a long, sharp skewer-like needle that he digs right deep into Peeta’s wrist.

Peeta actually cries out, forcing with his right hand, panicking, trying to get away. He feels himself go slacker and suddenly struck with an inability to move. He can feel, though, Jesus, what have they done that makes it hurt like this? The skewer, or the needle, or whatever is making him scream like this winks coyly at his, buried in skin that feels on fire, like it doesn’t belong to Peeta. His breathing becomes tight, he needs out, he needs to get out now.

The boy watches him in horror, and the surgeon goes in for Peeta again, malicious intent, pulling out the needle with such force hat a steady stream of blood follows it, hot and sticky as it runs down Peeta’s arm. It seems so stark against his skin. Tears are threatening to spill in his eyes, but he fights them, they will not win, they will not beat him, he will not let them without a fight.

It’s a one-sided war, of course. There can only ever be one winner.

On his back, Peeta faces the ceiling, he keeps himself resolute in fighting any emotion that creeps onto his face. It was okay to cry at the platform, at the station, those were eyes he could trust, that were mournful as his, but here there is no pity, there is nothing, and Peeta feels like he is drowning, unable to move at all, unable to get enough air in him. Has the blue always been so cold? The red so strident?

“Easy, now.” The surgeon warns the boy, maybe an apprentice student, but still another cog in this murderous machine. He turns to the side for a second, and then returns with a sharp, tiny knife. It glints in the light, romancing the air, seeking worthier prey but practising with Peeta. “You have to make the cut neat.”

Peeta hold his breath.

All of this can be broken. All of this can disappear. He tries to master it, to control himself, holding his Devil by it’s spoke, spinning t to the ground but he cannot move and these Devils and tricky, they aren’t of home and they mock what girls mean, who gave them flowers, they are quick and cut deep, quick, cheaply.

The surgeon brings down the knife with precision. Peeta erupts into another cry, not one of pain, but being torn from his body, trying to match the agony he has found himself in. He can feel each level of skin being broken into, the blood vessels exploding as they tear, each side wrenched from the other as blood spills over, messily, running the accuracy. He goes deep, Peeta screams, tears spilling down his face in hot, indescribably agony, he must be going all the way through. Was this always his fate?

He cannot breath, he realises it then, after his screams die away, he hears gasping, this desperate rasp for oxygen and it registers that it’s him, he’s making that noise. Part of him prays that he will suffocate. He will die here and be spared the agonies But he sees his chest collapsing and rising erratically, feels these tiny, pathetic breaths going through him, and he knows with a terrified whimper that he’s going to live.

Hold your Devil, he tries to remember, hold your Devil by his spoke, and spin him to the ground.

The pain is white-hot and Peeta feels himself go light. The sensation does not lessen. He spares another glance, and wants to vomit, he wants to hurl because he can smell it from here, the sticky blood ticking down his arm, pooling at his side. A mass of gore is lumped into the dish besides the surgeon, working furiously. He digs the scalpel in, like a shovel, tearing up at Peeta’s insides and causing ore bleeding, before wrending it form him, tearing out chunks of his arm.

After a while, he leans over, and with a bloody glove, picks up a small, electrical component. Embedded time, he thinks, in horror.

With a superhuman inhumanity, the surgeon starts to wire it in where skin and flesh used to be. Peeta isn’t screaming. He’s trembling, uncontrollably shaking, his face ruddy and flushed with tears that are sharp, but sting no worse that the venal blade of the surgeon. Home, Peeta tries, home, and his Devil, his Devil’s Spoke but nothing comes, save the white-hot pain that passes through him like a shock, making him convulse like a live wire.

His eyes remain fixed in the same spot, staring the mound of pulp and skin and blood and he can feel himself crying, not an active sob but a basic response, like being a child, all helpless and afraid again. He can’t do anything else: he can’t move. 

“You must make it clean,” The surgeon explains, as he fixes up the wires. Peeta no longer feels human, it’s the process coming to fruition. He feels mechanical, ready to serve, ready to die and dream of electric sheep. 

The component sends a judder through Peeta’s body, he feels it stirring him. Maybe the sedative is wearing off, he feels his body curl in on itself slightly, still pained and weak and shaking, still stuck with blood. He’s doesn’t feel brave, if he ever had done before. It’s as if somebody has said the magic words ‘abracadabra!’ and he goes stiff, like a brittle, lifeless brown leaf. 

The youth brings over a small metal lead and fiddles with the head. A small jet of cold water passes over the component, and Peeta’s wrist, clearing away the blood and fixing him up to look better. He lifts Peeta’s limp wrist and studies the set digital face. It tells the time, and it makes Peeta aware and hateful of every single moment that passes. 

He whimpers, and stares into the face of the youth, who offers no sympathy.  

“Now,” The surgeon says, as she turns to a selection of salves. Peeta’s eyes are blurred and swimming but he can just about see the yellow triangles, warning, with words he doesn’t really know like ‘corrosive’ and ‘caustic’. “What are we going too do about all of those scars?” 

Peeta makes a noise of terror. The youth grins. 

*

‘SURPLUS LAWS TIGHTENED’, the ugly newspaper font reads. Cato doesn’t bother with the smaller text, just the headline. Truth be told, he doesn’t really believe in it. Newspapers will have you believe almost anything, and he’s been the victim of that before. Clove seems pretty entertained. Anything not to talk to him, lips pursed, face fixed in hostility.  

“Do you always move your lips when you read?” He asks, trying to pull her back into the conversation. He wants her attention again, and he can see her trying to fight it, but she gives in, never lifting her eyes from the page, keeping a cold mask. 

“Do you always have to complain?” Clove tuts. She’s always so quick to fight back, and so hotheaded. It isn’t meaningful, though. They have only ever been serious a few times. When she screamed for Cato, when she was so certain he’d die. 

“Untrue.” Cato grins. “I haven’t said anything about that dress, love of mine.” 

She sighs, actually very irritated, and folds over the paper, watching out of the windows and into the brilliantly lit night. The train has slowed, and all of the passengers lurch forward slowly as it comes to a halt. Cato leans into her, wanting to be close, but unable to rationalise the thought to words. It’s stupid, he knows, but he wonders if she ever feels this way, if she ever needs him. 

She leads, as if she’s trying to avoid him, onto the platform and around, to the long, white path. It’s a long way, and he’s struggling to keep up with her. His lip is bleeding, because Cato is strong, but he isn’t always so quick. Slow isn’t great, but he hasn’t ever lost. It’s an unseasonably warm evening, people spilling out into gardens and laughing. Fireflies, and the occasional birds flick through the city, trying to find the sparsity of trees. 

Cato takes one of her arms and tries to slow her down, but Clove tugs away, and it shocks him. “Clove.” His voice is gentler than usual, but not soft enough to pry her from her mood. Aware that his tactic is failing, Cato spins her to face him, roughly. “Dammnit, Clove.” 

She struggles under his grasp and pries herself away. Her face is white with anger. “Cato—” She is flustered and indignant, fixing a strand of her away from her face. He laughs, mirthlessly, and shakes his head. 

They fall into silence, already in the thick of town. I’s warm, and pretty much everybody is open for business, shedding artificial light on the invincible darkness. Dull porters weave through tables to serve customers, and in the main square, as is the season, they have Surpluses lined up according to which firm they belong to.  Clove heads there, passing all of the restaurants and shops, with bold smells that make her stomach turn. Nothing makes it turn worse than Cato, of course, but that’s for a different reason altogether. 

He can’t help but make a scene anyway, gripping her arm again as they pass the first few rows, pretty young things. A few of the girls make Cato look up, which serves to enrage Clove further. They both know what kind of man he is. 

“Come on, dearest.” He hisses. “Indignance doesn’t become you.” Clove stamps on his toe and gets away, momentarily, going to linger by the section of older ones, so that Cato will have to behave himself under the public eye. He almost never does, but it’s the best she can muster. He follows behind, grimacing. 

“Are you angry with me?” He laughs, in an ugly tone. “You’re angry with me, after that?”  Clove turns on him and speaks in a violent whisper, hating to be shown up here, and having had a scene made back on the train. The whole thing has been an unmitigated disaster. 

“I don’t have to listen to this.” She reminds him, trying to calm herself. He only wants a reaction, that’s the only reason the impudent, stupid man exists, to provoke Clove and embarrass her and mess with her. Even when they were in the arena, even then, he still found ways to make sure everybody knew he had her played.  

“I didn’t have to do that for you,” Cato says, far too loudly, exasperated. It’s the only emotion he ever seems to display, some form of aggression or frustration. She sighs again. 

“Really?” She shakes her head. “That was for me, that little display? That was for my benefit?”   

"Yes!" Cato snaps right back at her, his face going pink with impatience. This is a safe kind of anger, Clove recognises it. He's never snapped anybody's neck when he's in a mood like this, to her relief. Not that he's never been murderous to her before, it's Cato's nature to be like that. What he was taught all of his life, so he's somehow excused. "Of course it was for you!"

Clove pushes a hand through her hair and scans the faces of the sad children in front of her. There are so many types of Surplus, even though they all do the same basic job. The beautiful girls, obviously for some kind of sexual gratification and objectification. The smaller,plainer ones are usually seamstresses and cooks, hapless little creatures that don't have it so comfortable because they don't look a certain way. 

"Well, next time--" She looks over at the boys, the hardy creatures usually bought as sparring partners. They all look so peaceful, even with all of their strength and indoctrinatin. Even with such an ugly fate. Was Cato ever like that? Clove doubts it. 

"Next time, don't bother, okay?" People are starting to stare at them, some recognising them, others questioning what right these two have to disrupt the peace. Birds are singing to calm them both down. Being Angry is tiring, Clove does not have the energy to last much longer. She wants them to go back to being naive and silly and lucky to be alive. He wasn't so temperamental, then. "Let's just pick a Surplus and go home," 

For once, Cato seems at a genuine loss for what to say. He can't see to keep his mouth closed, leaving him thoughtless, wordless, and useless. She supposes that he's never been much good with talking, he has never had to say anything before Clove. Even in getting married, and having to say only two words, he seemed to have difficulty.  That had been when they were sweet, would you believe, when she was so sure they were in love. The irony of the past isn't lost on her at all. 

There's no more talking. He follows her, still mute, through the assembly of the youths, of all ages and descriptions. The dissociation process is quite miraculous, they all thank the Capitol surgeons for ridding each Surplus of their former lives. It's difficult for Clove to be around a District 12 for very long without thinking about the games, about Cato's horrifying display at the bloodbath. 

Suddenly, she realises that some will recognise them, and she feels sick. They must be petrified: brutal, bloody Cato, and the girl that never misses. At least some Surplus can pretend to be merciful. 

She is practical, unlike her her half. Clove thinks about home, and all the things they have need for. Somebody to brighten up the place, certainly. A nice young thing who ought to be impressed by the wealth of the Victor's Village. One who is a Valuable Asset, too, who can cook and clean and garden and all the rest of it. Musical aptitude would not go amiss, either, as the house is always so quiet with Cato never being home. They'll need a Surplus that can attend to children by some stretch of the imagination. Clove has never been very nurturing, she suspects she shall need help. 

 They have a generous section taken up by Surpluses that can farm, even though it's unpopular here to grow anything. Make the other Districts work, they always say. There is a reason the Capitol subjugates them, they deserve the work they are given. Clove doesn't pay them much mind, anyway, she is vain of a garden over a vegetable patch, the best of days.

Household Surpluses are at the very end of the square. They are dressed in white, the giveaway of their function, and have swollen, strident wrists where fresh incisions have been made. Embedded time is very important. A late Surplus will not do for any household, least of all theirs. Not only that, but Surpluses have been known to become complacent, or even violent. Embedded time serves as another reminder that they are owner, their time is governed by their household, and not their own decisions. 

Cato lingers by a dark-haired girl, further back, and takes all of her in. Of course it would be a girl, another way to pry a reaction from Clove, to get her angry. She hasn't any time for him tonight, or most night, but especially today, with that carved lion and that fight on the train. Still, he glances over her, folding an enormous arm over the top of the other. The Surplus, a good, obedient little thing, keeps her eyes downcast, to demonstrate her insignificance. 

Clove turns to the domestics, mostly girls, and peruses them. She wants a pretty little thing, something for her, to flaunt to Cato. It's hard to keep a cold view on things, though, because she's tired and it's been a long day and they all look so pathetic. One of the boys in the second row is even crying. 

"What's wrong with him?" Clove turns to the Rendering officer in charge and gestures to the boy. His eyes are all bright as he cries, softly. Renderers are not paid to care, they just sell the Surpluses. She'd be impressed if he could say. Before the Renderer can even speak, the one next to the crying Surplus actually finds the temerity to speak, and to Clove directly. 

"He's pretty shaken." The boy explains. Clove is taken aghast. Not even bought Surpluses speak to their owners without definite permission. He makes nothing of it, too, as if he has the right to stand there, an equal to her, and actually make eye contact. It's in the eyes, this reluctance to become a commodity, to submit. They dart about, curious of their surroundings, like all of this if for him. He looks older, in his eyes, too. Like he's seen so much he should have shut his eyes to. 

"Excuse him." The Renderer says, nervously, caught out. "A beating ought to tighten his tongue, miss." Clove nods, trying to overcome the shock of him speaking. Even now, The boy stands proudly, shoulders apart, like he has done nothing wrong. The nerve of him! Not even the threat of a beating makes him flinch. 

"I should hope so." Clove says, stiffly. The boy keeps looking at her, neither inviting or cold, but just looking. He's even a little hostile. She can seen where they have broken him, where he has been crying. The Capitol do an excellent job in cleaning them up, dissolving skin to get rid of scars, fixing them up. Clove often wonders why they don't cut out their tongues, like Avoxes, but that's a political punishment, and she supposes it would lose it's power if distributed to the mass of Surpluses.   
  
She can hear him coming, and all of a sudden Cato is at her side again, still motionless and mute. It makes her want to pick quickly, and suddenly.   
  
Cato points to a skinny girl at the front. Her skin has been bleached with an acid, just like the rest of them, and her hair has been trimmed into a short ponytail. She's pretty, Clove knows.  The Renderer makes an noise of interest.   
  
"Excellent eye, sir." He says, dramatically.  "She's a pretty little thing. Useful little cook, too." Clove shakes her head immediately. She knows what he's playing at.   
  
"I'll pick." She says, certainly. As a student of names, she holds a hand out and is passed the list. It's important not to be swayed by their appearances.  All of them are typical of poor Districts, plain and uninteresting. none leap out at her.   
  
She won't have a girl. No, she knows what Cato is like, and he uses sex as a weapon. Pretty soon, they'll have something on their hands, if they pick a girl, and they won't be able to do anything about it. At least Clove is faithful, which is why she deserves a pretty piece of skin. The bolder boy is looking at her again. He's tall and impossible. She tries to find his name, but it's impossible to tell. and she won't take it back once it's been said either, she won't be wrong in front of any of these Surpluses, or Cato.   
  
The other boy is still crying. It's nauseating. Honestly, it's not enough that they are given the opportunity. Some are so ungrateful, and useless. Clove is a firm believer in using force. 

  
She clears her throat, watching the reactions of the Surpluses. Everybody holds heir breath.   
  
"Clove..?" Cato speaks. She snaps out of her reverie quickly, still not looking at him. The dark-haired boy watches her still. She has to choose wisely.   
  
"Peeta." She says, without emotion. "Peeta Mellark."   
  
The crying boy lifts his head, frozen in terror.    
  
"Excellent choice, also."  The Renderer nods. The dark-haired boy drops his head. The crowd parts to let him through.   
  
This boy, Peeta, can be no older than eighteen, but looks about sixteen, his hair stiff and pushed out of hi face. His skin has also been bleached and purged. Clove is surprised to find herself feeling pity, good heavens, pity for this little stray. He's quite stocky for a Surplus. Not compared to Cato, but he's certainly not weak. Even now, however, he's still crying a bit, obviously having had a rough time.  It will take a considerable amount of crying to disregard him as a Valuable Asset.   
  
He turns back to the rest of the crowd. With a trembling hand, he places three fingers to his lips, and then raises his arm up. They do the same, all silent, just watching the boy.   
  
The boy starts to cry again, and turns to Clove.   
  
"Excellent choice, sweetheart." Cato chides to her. She feels determined to prove him wrong. 


	4. Act 2, Scene 1

_First, there is desire._

_All eyes are ice. Ghostly spectators watch, a myriad of spectres that haunt, rather than participate, in the world around them. The girl in the centre of the floor, the girl set alight, smells of combustion and something else, sweet and life-giving, akin to both honey and death. She does not think not think to move at all, paralysed in want to the boy before her, but instead smiles, so rare and far between, but torn from her soul. Somewhere, he can hear violins, and as Peeta draws nearer, he becomes intoxicated by her, the scent of her skin and some foreign flowers._

_Then, there is passion._

_Without words, she brings him into a lustful kiss, her hands set like stone, one on his shoulder, and the other on the small of his back. Peeta doesn't feel nervous, for the first time in ages. His calm radiates throughout the room. Steady, she calls him, always steady. And not one of them trembles, so natural, so comfortable. Her hair is dark and smells like rose root, jasmine and the florist shop, in summer. When she meets his eyes, there is only certainty and want, the kind that remain fixed on Peeta while the rest of the world burns._

_The spectres make such beautiful music, and Peeta can feel himself being swayed, the sensation passing through her, and then him, and he feels like half of the heart, assured that the chambers and the valves pump the sentiment to her when hi words cannot. Not swaying, anymore, he realizes suddenly that they're dancing, and her breath is tickling his neck. Love, he thinks, love after all of this, and so long. It comes like falling asleep. Slow, at first, but then consuming and comfortable._

_Nobody else dares to penetrate the silence. As she twirls, her skirt brushed against Peeta's legs and he can feel these gentle, romantic flames licking at the fabric and romancing the skin. He could burn here, like this. He could turn to ash in her arms and it would be enough. It's so sudden that they're kissing again, his hand stroking the nape of her neck and sighing. It's real. It's real and he needs this, it's like oxygen and he breathes he in like she's about to disappear. The flames still kiss at his shins, making his strength go weak at the knees, held up in her steadfastness._

_She spins out, and Peeta's still a bit shaken, but she's spinning too far and too fast and wildly, too gone for his hands to reach, and she spins away into the dreadful silence, and this darkness and dust is gathering from her feet and clouding the air. Peeta is about to be left along, he doesn't want her to leave him here, not on his own, not as useless as this. He can't seem to move, sinking into the wood as he screams out, hopelessly._

_"Katniss!" He screams, and suddenly it's not just him, his voice is lost over the rabble of people and they are crushing him, too close, too tightly packed in. Can't breathe. Can't breathe because his lungs are on fire and she's gone, Christ, where has she gone? How far has she spun that she might not spin again? "Katniss!" But now she's disappeared into the darkness of boys and he tried to scream again, he loves her and he can't breathe and the blue is cold, the red explosive and suddenly he's not the only one screaming— "Katni-"_

_High on the stage, the pink-haired lady mocks them. "Katniss Everdeen." And it's too late; she's gone, slipped out of Peeta's fingers like liquid sunshine. Peeta's hearing is shot and he's sinking into the ground, drowning and struggling, and unable to breathe. But that's not the worst part. No, that's not the worst part at all._

_"Peeta Mellark."_

_And suddenly it's not Effie on the stage, bright and bubbly, but Clove, in her orange dress, with her hair pulled away from her face, face fixed in a grimace. The crowd is dead with silence and she's looking right at him, right into his soul and tearing it apart, laughing at all of his thoughts because he's worthless and embarrassing. Her eyes pass behind him, into the nothingness of the crowd and she smiles, like a wound wide open. No more flowers, no more rose root and jasmine, but blood, the foul stench that makes Peeta think of pulp and flesh, of embedded time._

_He tried to get away, his feet begin to backpedal and he thinks they'll forget h, he's free, he's getting away and it' all going to be okay, it's all going to be-_

_Peeta screams in anguish, he watches as the other end of the blade glints, bursting through his heart, where sentiment is no longer found, and Katniss is screaming but Peeta cannot hear her, he cannot save her and he hears a whisper in his ear, hot and tormented and as sharp as the sword, belonging to his owner._

_"I can still do this." Cato hisses, breathless. "One more kill."_

_He draws he blade out of Peeta's chest, and he's coughing up blood, choking, dying, the universe collapsing and expanding before his eyes._

_"Katniss…" He gasps, a bloody hand clawing at the floor._

_Only the wind dares volunteer take his place._

Peeta wakes in a horrified sweat at exactly three o'clock. It's quiet, in the house, with only the sound of his breathing to comfort him. There is n Katniss, no Girl on Fire dancing for him. There's no reaping, he's not going to die in the arena. It's the only comfort he has, and he clings to it. Not all of the dream was so fabricated. Peeta knows, and he's scared, because through the house and up the stairs, curled around a dagger, Clove is sleeping, and she's laying besides Cato, brutish, macabre Cato. They feel no remorse in killing, Peeta has seen it.

He could barely watch the game this year. Not with Katniss, whom he had loved so truly, whom he had never even spoken with. She'd done so well, she could have won. But he supposes it was inevitable, for them to win. The inhuman duo of District 2, the Careers. Peeta was sure they felt nothing; he was so sure they deserved to die, for slaying his youthful love, but then they saw it. The world saw what they both had strived so hard to hide.

She's screamed. She thought she would die, and Clove no longer cared about being weak of objectified or desirable, she was facing death and she wanted Cato to save her, to hold her hand as she slipped into the darkness. Her voice was taut and frayed.

"Cato!" Her eyes were squeezed shut, but her assailant, the boy from eleven, cared none. His name was Thresh, and he did not deserve to die the way he did, unceremoniously. "Cato!" Again, she cried out, Thresh was sure to kill her, all while Katniss watched, terrified, helpless.

"Clove!" From the thicket, his voice came. It was the only time during the games, save for maybe the finale, that Peeta could be sure Cato felt anything but aggression. It seemed he felt a great deal more than that, and he appeared in a second, leaning on his heels, throwing the spear (Marvel's, not his, but Cato used it anyway. Peeta had heard him say 'it wasn't' as if Marvel was coming back to claim it'). The lance pierced Thresh's back and drove itself in to the hilt. In a second, he dropped Clove, who was spluttering and gasping for air. In a second, Katniss was gone. They let her go. It seemed Cato had only focus enough for Clove.

"It's okay." He said to her. It was anything but, though she seemed to believe him. "You're okay, we're okay." For a second, he looked as if he would slip into malice again and pursue Katniss, but instead he gripped Clove's arms and kissed her, ferocious and passionate and scared.

After that, they went back to machines again. Had they ever grown out of it?

Peeta is afraid that they'll kill him. He's a Surplus, now, after all, and it wouldn't be the first time. He has heard the way they talk to each other, heaven forbid, an actual married couple, threats to kill and insults and ironic pet names. He can' help but think of his mother, who's philosophy on relationships always was 'you can kill them with kindness'. So she never bothered.

Upstairs, Clove is restless and she cannot sleep. It's that Surplus' eyes, those sad, blue eyes that make her feel very cold inside. Maybe that's just the house, and the way there's nothing in most of the rooms, just the sound of the District wind whistling through it, trying to strike up the Mockingjays. What makes her feel alone, most of all, is Cato, just a body in the sheets. She wants to say that she loves him, that it's the same as it was in the arena, where she'd scream for him, and live and die by his side.

The truth is, of course, that Clove isn't sure she feels anything anymore. But, here, married, she is resigned to this fate, wasting away months in this empty house, and then at night, in the arms of a man she does not love, counting the kicks from a child that will bind them together.

The Surplus might ease her loneliness. He can't be entirely useless he must know how to speak or garden or cook. His only skill can't be blubbering pathetically. All of the others had time embedded and were taken from their families, and they managed to keep it together. The boy is weak, she thinks, but he'll soon toughen up. With Cato, as sadistic as he can be, the Surplus will have to.

She thinks about the feast at the cornucopia, and how Cao was so quickly upon her, how he kissed her. They have never kissed like that again, not even on their wedding night. They fuck, often enough that she doesn't search for physical attention outside of him. But that's all it is, an action. He doesn't feel or speak. It's a silent contest not to make a noise, not to let the other win. Clove often bites her lip in victory, grinning to herself as Cato grunts through his orgasm. He loses, she thinks, but that's the only thing he ever lets her win at.

Clove cannot help despising Cato as he sleeps, no nightmares tonight, but probably dreams of somewhere else with somebody else. He's beautiful, she knows, and can afford no better term for him. Even now, I sleep, his flaxen shock of hair looks soft and his lips look inviting. His enormous arms never fix themselves around her, and she wonders, for the longest time, isn't she pretty enough, isn't funny enough, isn't enough for him. It's the worst feeling in the world.

Unable to stand the sound of his breathing any longer, she tries herself out of the sheets and into the hallway, adjusting her nightgown (silk with gossamer end, which Cato had brought her from District 8, the thing so expensive that the people couldn't believe they had sold it). It's always cold here, in this house, and there are no flowers, nothing to fill the smell of paint, and unhappiness. It's not as if Cato sees any of it, ever, anyway, he's always at the academy, sword-fighting and fencing or in town, finding a spot to drink and be admired.

The irony lies in the fat that Cato loves Clove more than she loves him. He's just not good with words. He's just better with violence.

Clove can't bear to think of him no longer and she calls down to the boy who sleeps in the pantry, the other blonde, quite cute, but not with that arrogance Clove used to love. The one that she initially fell for. "Surplus." Her voice is shot down the darkening stairs and projected back at her. "Surplus Peeta?"

After a long pause, Peeta shuffles out from the surly pantry floor and into the hallway, behind the kitchen. He's still in white, the same, standard white that they all wear, as Surpluses. He wears this set for three days as his work clothes, and then his recreational whites become his work clothes until they get washed. It saves water, which they don't want to waste on lowly scum form outline Districts. A lump of coal is worth so much back home. Here, Clove takes no note that she has enough to eat, and it makes Peeta want to scream.

"How can I help you, miss?" He says, trying to sound breezy and upbeat, trying to brighten up the place, as young Surpluses are supposed to do. The duty to be beautiful. She stares at him, more of a glare, and considers what to say.

"Make me a drink." At last, the lady speaks. He keeps thinking she'll call out his name and he'll feel Katniss' fire against his legs, but she never looked this way, she never cared. The girl on the stairs is hard to see as so cold and bloodless; her face is flushed and she's swaying, quite a bit. A far cry from that girl on the screen, the one who screamed for her love, and what love? Peeta nods, knowing his Place.

"Certainly. Would your husband like anything?" There is no personality to his tone. Clove grimaces.

"I'm sure he can go without." She assures him. The silence between them is awkward and embarrassing. What can Peeta say? He's vastly uninteresting, and Clove won't care about his nightmares just as he doesn't ask about hers. He wants to keep a low profile anyway, he wants to lip their minds so that if Cato goes into a fit of rage he won't come looking for his Surplus, who 'deserves it'. "Water, please." She does not look so well, and he thinks it might help her.

Peeta nods his head and turns away, going back into the kitchen. What he sees makes him sick: full cupboards and fresh breads. Meats and spices and processed foods, which are rare, back at home, expensive, unpopular. There is no squirrel, fresh from the woods, and no stew with dog's meat carelessly tossed in. It makes Peeta feel faint just to see it, and he wonders if he could somehow get it home, to his brothers, to Prim, the girl who suffered most out of Clove's victory.

They have literally nothing in their cheese box, either. Over here, and in most rich Districts, they call it a refrigerator and put eggs and margarine and perishables in the cool, with their one, processed, measly bit of cheddar. Peeta loved to sample all the different kinds at home. He would sometimes rise early and bake pear tart with gruyere stuffed crust.

She follows after him, and Peeta snaps out of his trance, working on the task at hand, ignoring the throbbing in his wrist. It hurts, and it might always hurt, but nobody in these Districts buys a Surplus because they think of them as actual people. That would be absurd, to find intelligent life in the humans of District 12. Well, Peeta cannot find any humanity here, so he supposes it evens out.

Worst comes to worst when Clove takes a seat at the diner and holds her head. "Get me an aspirin." She orders him. "I've such a headache."

They gave one to Peeta when they tore out the flesh of his am. How curious that they take pills so carelessly here. Not even the Peacekeepers can afford to buy aspirin at home. He has memorised the kitchen, so that he'll not make a mistake and earn a beating out of the venomous career still sleeping. So far as first days, or mornings, go, this has been bearable.

When he returns, Clove looks dangerously pale. Her eyes are bloodshot and they roll around in their pink sockets, looking anywhere but Peeta, as if he evokes some kind of horrible memory, as if he cannot stand the sight of her.

"Thankyou." She says, dismissing him when he's done his job. Clove hates the way his eyes look or the way he stares at her, and worst of all, the past he unearths, of being owned, and commodified. How has Cato so easily forgotten when it still plagues her horribly?

She sways, again, and grips the side. "Peeta." She hisses, urgently. Within a minute, he's at her side. "Surplus, help me."

The helpless woman can barely hold herself up against the table's surface and looks so desperately at Peeta, expecting miracles, expecting knowledge from the Baker's son, and Peeta is reminded of his mother again because he cannot help. Useless Peeta, stupid, stupid by and she was right about him always, it just takes this to prove it. He flounders, doubling back to the hall. ~

"I should wake your husband." He says, afraid. "He'll be able to help you."

"No-" Clove's voice is just a whisper. She closes her eyes, and Peeta is scared that she might not open them so quickly if she continues like this. "Not Cato," She begs him. Not the husband she despises, because he is always looking at other beauties, other blondes but he never turns to Clove to say 'I only nee' because it's not her, it's never her, and it makes any love between them once afraid, petrified and stunted.

Peeta looks at her, exasperated. He looks back down the hall and shakes his head. "I'm so sorry." And he goes to leave her, just like that.

Clove stands up, shakily, after him, and starts to shout. "Don't you dare, Surplus, I'll have you dead!" love steadies herself against the doorframe. Her face has gone purple. She takes a fistful of Peeta's collar and shakes him, weakly.

"Sir?" He calls up, again and again, trying to rouse the huntsman to seek worthier prey, and his wife, and happy nights to happier days but none come too quick. Clove slaps him.

"You will not disobey me!" She screams. Her eyes go flush and her grip loosens. "You will not-" She gets no further. Her body softens and she completely falls, slack, into Peeta. Her eyes slip shut and she fades from consciousness.

A noise breaks from the silence of upstairs. Cato is awake.

 


	5. Act 2, Scene 2

Somewhere between infinity and nothingness, Cato wakes.

It's not dreams that wake him verging on heaven and hell, leaving him standing waist-deep in the purgatory of drowsiness. He thinks of the heaven he'd dreamed, of her, always of Clove, standing in the sunshine of an evening. The scent of her skin was the same as always, the air around her swollen with violets and a perfume of tulips. That's what wakes him up: the cold, odourless air of the room from where the window is open.

There is no Clove besides him, to assure his nightmares back into fables. Her image isn't enough, but it seems she's vanished from the room, having left no happy drop of her intoxicating perfume to let Cato back into sleep. He turns onto his back and stares into the darkness, thinking about the house, so big, too big, and how the wind whistles right through it, like the mockingjays. The birds remind him of the arena. Everything does, but their song, most of all.

It wasn't until after the bloodbath, when everything fell into silence that he registered them. They sang, to mourn the dead, and Cato was overcome with shame, at everything he had turned out to be.

Still, in this dead, haunted night, nobody dares to sing. The piano sits downstairs, untouched, unloved for the most part. Sometimes, when Cato was staying in the Capitol before the games, he would think about the house he's have, with Clove. It was a fantasy, then, because only one of them could be the victor. But in his head, in his daydreams when he was sure nobody could read his face, there was a big house with a proud garden, that smelt like violets and was filled with music, with joy and vitality.

He used to wonder, how would she be, his lady? Clove didn't love, she never had done, biting her tongue and trying to cut Cato's out. Of course, this was Cato's desires, it was his fantasy, and why not? In his head she smiled more and she kissed him and she meant every damn word she uttered to him, all of the 'I love yous' and they were normal, Jesus, people could be around them without fear. When Cato whistles with the mockingjays, he not only mourns the dead, but every different version of this life that died before it could bloom.

Worst part is, Cato believed himself. He'll believe almost anything.

When he was first selected as tribute, Cato's mother turned to him and said 'You will make this District proud'. He believed her then, he knew it. Ceaser Flickerman had turned to him and said 'You're a very strong contender' and Cato had already guessed that much, he was told and he believed it, he ate up all of the Capitol's affection. They strive so hard for beauty, and that is what a victor is supposed to be: beautiful. 'We're made it' Clove gasped to him, that night on top of the cornucopia, as the hovercraft lowered itself to the ground. He believed her, he wanted to so badly.

Cato chose to ignore the cold light in her eyes when she first said 'I love you' or even 'I do'. He shut his eyes to her tears, and her absolute terror, not fear, but terror when Clove trembled in his arms and whispered 'we're going to have a baby, Cato'.

Now, he is alone with his thoughts and it cuts worse than any of the times she's sliced hi with any knife or dagger. No, Cato tried to assure himself. If she didn't love him, even the smallest part, even the littlest bit, she wouldn't share his bed, they wouldn't fuck sometimes, often, too often, silent and strange but  _familiar_  and _good_. Eyes to eyes and nose to nose and tearing off eachother's skin and clothes and nervous systems until they stand both physically and emotionally naked, clawing at the skin they find.

Cato hears her out in the hall. The sound of her voice slips through the white-hot crack in the doorway and sleeps next to Cato, so desirable and naked and ready and made for him, the curve of the bones to fit his. It's right, the thinks, but Clove stays outside, she doesn't look to want. She leaves him for the company of that Surplus.

Useless, cold-footed swine. She pinched his name out of thin air, and he pathetic Surplus just sobbed all the way home, trying to keep his blubbering quiet At least he's domesticated, Cato thinks, Not like the strays of Districts 11, that can do nothing but farm, and what good would that be in a city, where the only plants are vain flowers, that look upon themselves as modestly as their owners? What makes him so special, that he breaks when all of the other Surpluses remain steadfast? They have all shared his experiences.

Cato's mind turns back to Clove, downstairs. He can hear her murmurs, but not clearly enough to fathom words from the white noise still ringing in his ears. The best way of dealing with it is to drink, or to fight, to find some cocky, skilled Career at the academy and go at it until one is bleeding or both are weary. Clove has never found leave to pick up a knife since the Games. They haunt her, the feel of the weight in her hands. Instead, she sticks to the town, and spends Cato's money.

He sits up in bed when he hears her protesting. Her voice is stretched, and it's unlike to Clove to show any weakness, ever, it's unlike her to let anybody in, so Cato starts to panic, as anybody would, and he strives to hear the words. The Surplus, first, dutiful and useless, but then the unmistakable protests of Clove, and something that Cato tries to regard with no importance.

'Not Cato' she begs him. It's a strange way of saying she's supposed to love him.

It's not long before she is screaming, and Cato doesn't care, he feels himself moving before he can help it. This is Clove, as she has always been, his love, first, and his wife, the reason he both lives and is alive. Who could ask for any more? Like not so long ago, Cato leaps into alertness and searches the darkness for direction and a friend.

She threatens the boy with death, as always, that's Clove. But then, she breaks out into hysterics, and starts to howl.

"You will not disobey me!" She cries out "You will not—" But her words rot and fall away. Cato starts to panic. He jumps to his feet. Clove always makes a point to finish everything. What has happened to her that she's fallen quiet so quickly, o that she screamed? Cato thinks of the feast, of Thresh, and he races out into the hall, stumbling back in blindness before finding his way down the stairs.

In a fluster, he finds them, in the kitchen, and his blood boils.

Clove's body is limp and almost lifeless. Her face is fresh with colour and she looks as if she's asleep. No more fury, but peace, and sleepiness is thankful on her features. Her eyes are closed and calm. Her lips are parted slightly in such a way that invites kissing, even though she hates it; even though she insists Cato never kiss her. Her hair has fallen over her face, and one shoulder, a waterfall of sin black. She's so thin, too, and pale, angelic but in a dark way. Cato thinks how personal this side of her is, and how rarely it is seen.

But mostly how the Surplus has his arms fixed around her, holding her up.

Cato feels his face go pink with all of his rage, and while he wants to be rational and merciful and patient, his nature disallows it, and all he finds is jealousy that she's here, alone in the dark with a God-dammed Surplus, and she had begged him, not Cato, never Cato when they are supposed to be together. That was how it started, back in their early days, when Clove started to throw knives and Cato discovered his mean streak. They broke things, nobody cared. They shared a mutual bloodlust and that was it, a match made in heaven, or hell, or the purgatory that Cato woke up wading in.

He can smell her tulip perfume, and that's the final straw.

In his white-hot rage, Cato tears Clove from his arms, still asleep, unconscious, oblivious and so damn beautiful. The force is such that Peeta topples backwards, landing in a sitting position, scurrying back across the kitchen floor in fear. IT all feels so familiar, that when Cato goes to think of some kind of threat or warning, anything at all to make sure Peeta knows his Place, no words spring to mind, nothing, but the words of a slaughtered youth. Raising a nasty finger with his free hand, Cato addresses him.

"You get this once." He chooses his words very carefully. "If it happens again-" his breathing is rough with all of that panic and he chances a look down at Clove, so feverish, and peaceful. Did she faint? Was it the heat of today, that desert, or the slain dignity of that little lion carving? It doesn't matter, he knows, she's fine, she's breathing.

Peeta looks so terrified. Just like a child, and he's trembling with that same fear. Cato wants to call him pathetic, but he can't muster it, and instead finds pity, where there should be fury.

"I'm so sorry," Peeta whispers. Sorry to be found like this? Cato cannot be sure. All he knows is that they both are so very sorry indeed, from their very souls, that she had begged for somebody anybody but Cato.

"Get gone." He snaps, and the boy scrambles, terrified, all legs, over his own feet and into the darkness of the other end of the kitchen. Cato isn't sorry to miss him from Clove's form. He might never hear to which front her loyalties lie. Certain they are alone, he adjusts Clove's body, so that her head rests on his shoulder and that her back is supported with one of his arms. Shyly, he places a hand to her forehead and feels the beads of sweat forming. The poor, feverish thing.

In the hours that pass, his lady sleeps.

Peeta remains in the pantry, terrified to show his face to Clove, who will feel betrayed, and most of all Cato, who could have killed him, in such anger. He thinks about these people who he is owned by, and knows so little about. All he knows for sure is that they're victors, and they won by murdering a boy from District 12, of no description, and with him the Girl on Fire, Peeta's girl, his lady, his love, only if that she knew she were.

Upstairs, of course, there is waiting, and the man who whistles with the mockingjays. Sometime later, a slender man, in a Surplus uniform and a green pin, is shown into the house by Cato, and lead upstairs, to Clove, still so small and still asleep. It' s none of his business, but Peeta feels the smallest bit of responsibility, and he lingers on the top of the stairwell, trying to hear, trying to see if Cato is still in s rage, or if he's going to make it a week, maybe, as their Surplus.

Oh, Jesus. Peeta sinks to his knees and takes a few deep breaths. It's so easy to forget, but the dull cache in his wrist, the feeling as each minute slips by reminds him that he's on somebody else's time now, not his own. Was he ever? Peeta thinks how he was least loved by his mother, and how this was always going to be his fate. They knew, didn't they, the moment he was born, that he was going to be sold and owned and commodified because that's all he was worth.

He feels himself go taught with anger. Why should he care at all about these people? These monsters? Creatures that he doesn't know, but has seen murder. They took Katniss from those she didn't belong to and now they've taken him, with his humanity surgically removed, and replaced with nothing but time, minutes. Peeta looks down at his wrist, the component staring back at him, and he thinks about tearing it out, letting the wound re-open and bleed. But he knows deep down what he's trying to destroy is buried deeper, and much harder to get at. The pale skin of his wrist just seems so defenceless and innocent. He decides against it.

From inside of the bedroom, he can hear them talking in hushed whispers. His anger has dissolved into something he can ignore, for now. If he wants to survive with Cato's temper and Clove's strange demands, he'll have to keep pretty invisible. They're talking, and he struggles to listen. The walls in this house are thick and well-built. It is the masonry District, and the Capitol's favourite, for not rebelling. Peeta despises that: they make generations pay for the actions of others.

"And she often complains of dizziness?" The voice is unfamiliar, so Peeta concludes that it must belong to the white-wearing man. Of course, there's no noise from Clove, which makes Peeta assume she's still asleep. Or unconscious. He still isn't sure exactly what happened, if she fainted or anything like that. Maybe it's best that way. Still, the murmurings continue and he keeps quiet, straining to hear. "That's not uncommon."

"It isn't?" Cato sounds very serious. More so than he did in the Games, leading the way, setting his eyes on prey and shouting 'twelve down and eleven to go!'. He must love her a great deal more than he made anybody believe.

"Perfectly normal." That voice is soft and assuring. Maybe if Peeta could be so persuasive, and sound so in control of things, Cato wouldn't have snapped, he wouldn't have assumed. It's not going to be easy if they both think Peeta has eyes for the girl with the knives. "Keep her hydrated," The man still sounds so engaging. Even Peeta, out in the hall, having no right to eavesdrop, wants to take his advice and follow it to the letter. "Avoid stressful situations."

Cato seems to take it in. "They're going to be fine, right?" The other man lets out a chuckle, not unkindly.

"Not unless she hit anything on the way down. That, and wounded pride, of course."

In a rare moment of kindness, Peeta swears he can hear Cato speaking through a smile, a genuine one, of happiness rather than bloodlust or something else more devious. "Thank you," He says, that he would never say to his own Surplus, too useless to be thankful for, and better still, it's his duty, if he wants to support home, the forgotten paradise, that smell of flowers that were picked and bread. There are no flowers here, save for the places Peeta cannot reach, cracks within the place.

"If you have any more questions, you know where to find me," And it's not just cordialities. They fall silent again, and Peeta assumes that's the end of their conversation. After a few minutes, in the darkness, he can hear the door groan and he steps back, forcing himself down a few stairs, trying to look busy. Of course, it's a staircase (a glass one, at that, a feature Clove had picked because she liked the feeling of floating when on the steps) and there's not an awful lot you can pretend to do. Moments pass in the way whispers tear through a crowd.

The white-wearing passes him on the stairs, and his eyes are the most visible part, all silver with age. He nods sadly to Peeta, as if he knows that fate and more. The green pin is in the shape of a cross, the sign of a medic, of some description. Peeta didn't know you could get medical Surpluses. At least, you can't from District 12, because nobody is trained. They say nothing as he leaves, so Peeta turns back to the conversation, or moderate silence, with the others.

He creeps up a few steps, and can just about see, through the gap in the door. It's not much, visually, but dark and his eyes take a moment to adjust, pupils dilating to find vision in the black, to make out shapes and colours, and finally people. Clove sleeps on her side, facing away from him, and Cato is above the sheets, his arm fixed around her, the other being as something to lean on. He considers something to say, or do, before dropping his mouth onto her shoulder.

"It's too cold in here," Clove mumbles, just to be difficult. Cato lifts his head, at first in surprise, but then he smiles, and it doesn't look like anything Peeta has ever seen, this genuine look of glee, like he's found a secret pleasure and he's clinging to it.

"It would be, wouldn't it?" He counters. "You took quite the fall, darling."

"Shut up," Clove says, quickly. It makes Cato even hungrier for something to pry out of her.

"I never struck you for the fainting type, love, I always figured-" The mute noise of somebody getting slapped rings out in the darkness. Peeta finds himself smiling at this, and he's not sure why. It takes all he has not to laugh, too. For a second, Cato is tense, and surprise is colouring hiss features, but he brightens quickly, and turns back to her.

"Light of my life," She choruses, flatly. "Be very careful about how you finish that sentence," So, it seems he heeds her warning and remains mute, becoming slack and falling against her again, fixing her in this impossibly tight embrace. It's almost childlike: he's seen something he likes, and he doesn't want to let go, for the life of him. Clove isn't any more mature, wriggling for her own space. After a few minutes, they both fall into stillness, and Cato kisses her.

"I was worried." He whispers.

"You don't get points for caring."

"You could have been hurt," It's almost as if he doesn't hear her at all. Maybe Clove would answer back with something equally soft and loving but it appears she cannot summon it right now. After a while, she gets something out.

"But I wasn't." She mumbles.

"Clove." His tone grows serious and more mature. "Fine, maybe  _you_  wouldn't have been hurt, but that doesn't mean-" The girl flares up.

"This isn't the arena, anymore! I don't need you to look after me!" And for once, Cato doesn't even try to fight her. He seems to consider what to say a great deal, like the situation is slippery, that it must be handled with the utmost care.

"I want you both well," his voice is barely audible. Clove grumbles.

"Go the fuck to sleep."

And for a minute, it seems she's got her way and they both adjust themselves to go to sleep. Peeta wonders about how they work, if it's love or lust or something deeper, and a lot harder to see. But, ever the deviant, he leans up to whisper just once more.

"I love you."

What they both are struck with is the answer Cato never gets back.


	6. Act 2, Scene 3

It's much easier to get by in District 2. Peeta realises this quickly.

Back home, getting ill isn't taken lightly, it could be fatal, and wasting food would make anybody at the Seam blush. People help eachother out, but they all mutually struggle. It's fashionable to be clean, make-up is unheard of. Girls and boys alike aren't pressured to modify themselves much at all. Nobody has the money to drink, or take the little white pills that Peacekeepers sometimes slip the richest folks. Being alive in achievement enough.

It's not like that here. And it makes him want to scream.

Waste is ignored, there are no rations on water or food. Sometimes, at al fresco cafés, he can see people throwing out food, good and fresh bread t birds, where at home it would be eaten in tiny amounts, it would be expected to last. Illnesses can be cured, they can rebuild you, they have the parts, with pills and surgery, and take-two-of-these-a-day. Sometimes, at parties, they actually purge, to at more, as a way of enjoyment.

Nobody at home would even consider that. It's another form of wasting food, and the little you get down you has to stay there, and sustain you for as long as possible. What is this strange rabbit-hole he has explored? The garish Capitol fashions that creep into the patterns on their clothes, and the sharp heels of their shoes. Girls take razors to their legs, they cover their faces in white or green.

As a Surplus, it's not his place to stare or question, and he must always Know his Place. That's the mark of a Valuable Asset. But how can Valuable can Peeta be to these people, who would so freely injure themselves, cut away what makes them natural?

Peeta doesn't want to help any of them. He especially doesn't want to help his owners, Clove, who killed so freely, but couldn't fake a bit of love, even after all she's got? God's brad, it makes his skin feels aflame thinking about it. Peeta would gladly spend his life tied to a woman he felt nothing for if it would feed his family, if it would do anybody some good. And here she is, that same murderous girl, soaring through he moments of gilded wings.

Of course, Cato isn't much better. Peeta wouldn't chance another confrontation with him if he wanted to stay alive. All of that temper, and for what? It's funny how he expects Clove's love, after the way they talk to eachother, the way they so freely take such cheap shots at every opportunity.

It's easy for him to judge, he knows. But he can't help these people, they need miracles, and he's not even supposed to be here, he's supposed to be tucked in bed, at home, above the kitchen, with the windows open, with flour down his shirt, asleep and dreaming more ambitious little dreams. Clove might listen to him, once, but he has no suggestions for her. If she doesn't love him, why wouldn't she leave? What stops her as she stands on the edge of the world? Cato would spear him through the heart before words could crawl out of his mouth, so he won't risk that.

That's Peeta all over, he can't help helping. Only now, it's sort of his job.

They need all the help they can get, because a war starts that night.

After Clove is so quiet, it sends Cato into another temper. Not right away, of course. It's gradual, like falling asleep, or falling out of love. There are no flowers in this house, and Peeta hears him in the cool air.

"Clove?" His voice is unsure, not something that suited him very much at all. Peeta wonders what he would do, like a sword with to edges. If he would plead, perhaps, cut off his skin and stand there emotionally naked, ready for Clove to pour acid all over his skin, or if he'd snap, which is more likely, let's be honest.

Still, the girl remains so quiet, too silent, like a wrong hushed-up and there are no more flowers there. Peeta can feel himself begging her, answer him! Lie to him! Anything but this deafening silence, that sets everybody on edge. Clove seems to brace herself. Would Cato lay a hand on her? Worrying so much about her safety that he'll crush her if he doesn't get what he wants? The thought makes Peeta dizzy. At home, everybody has it hard. It's rare that anybody is bold enough to make it harder, by starting a fight.

"Go to bed," She says, after a while. It sounds too weak and defensive. That the best she can do? Not even a false 'I love you', not even some kind of excuse or platitude? Peeta, for the very first time, can understand Cato's fury.

"I said that I lo-"

"I heard you!" Clove snaps. She pulls back from his form, pressing herself into the pillow, her hair dripping down her side. Her voice comes softer and more afraid. "I heard you, Cato." But what she's really saying was something else entirely. She's pleading with him, not to hurt her. "I'm just…tired. We can talk in the morning."

Peeta can just about see a hand, an enormous hand reach out and grab Clove by the wrist she has lifted.

"We can talk about it now." He grinds out, furious. She struggles against him, but he is infinitely stronger, and her body flops like a fish on a line, thrashing against him.

"Cato-" She whimpers. "You're hurting me!" It grows into a cry, not of anger, but of fear and pain. Peeta can see her scraping for purchase. But finding none under his impossible grip. Cato must be really furious, because he never hints at letting go, but appears to grab tighter, twisting her arm at an awkward angle. Clove tried to remain resilient, but she's weak and tired and he's so much more relentless. She screams out again. "Let me go-"

So he does.

The girl is red in the face and gasping. She doesn't hesitate to slap him, as hard as she can., and Cato's face goes flush where her hand had been. Just this once, he seems oo angry to allow himself to strike back. Instead, he just stares at her, his face unreadable with emotionlessness. After a while, after an eternity of just the two staring at each other, Clove catching her breath, he finally fathoms his thoughts into words, and not a moment too soon.

"Do you despise me?" He asks, in a very out-of-character voice. It's too heavy with sadness, and he's not usually that forward. At least when Cato was hurting her, and shouting at her, she was all Cato could think about. But now, he's going to be thinking of himself, and their baby.

"I don't know." Clove murmurs. She doesn't, really. Neither of them have ever been delusional enough to expect a grand gesture of affection, but Cato had always had it figured, in his head, when nobody could read his face, that Clove loved him and wanted to spend her time with him. That all of their petty insults are another way of saying 'I love you' and 'I do' one more time.

Cato has grown accustomed the feeling he feels when his heart looks out of his eyes and sees her sleeping next to him.

Truth is, maybe Clove doesn't despise him, but he despises himself for ignoring the cold in her eyes when she

Peeta is sure he's about to get strangled when he sees Cato move away from her, he gets up leaves, too calm to be okay. Peeta can hear his heart running miles in his chest and he starts to panic, oh Jesus, he saw how Cato was in the kitchen, when Clove just passed out, so quick to be jealous, even if their love isn't equal or even real. Is he's caught listening, will Cato strangle him? Will he get so worked up that he snaps Peeta's neck, just like the boy in the Games. (Peeta had been watching in the public house, and the sound of each vertebrate crunching, and then just the mournful Mockingjay whistle makes him to this very day nauseous.)

He creeps back down the stairs, hurried, and turns back into the kitchen, terrified that Cato will catch him. Worst comes to fruition when he hears a voice calling after him.

"Coat, Surplus." Cato snaps. He doesn't dare to look at Peeta directly, and it doesn't even matter, it shouldn't, but this isn't how it's supposed to be. Peeta could get by when he hated them, it will be so much harder if he feels pity. So poor that all they have is money, an unenviable and wasted existence.

Frantic, Peeta lets out a breath and heads under the stairs, where they keep their coats and jackets. As he unhooks Cato's jacket, he gets the heavy scent of violets and tulips and notices Clove's small jacket, untouched and solitary on a hook. It is as black as her hair and Peeta wonders about her, but not for very long. This was always going to be easier when they were monsters, and murderers, but not real people.

Cato pauses on the stairwell, in a reverie, and Peeta feels like an intruder when he hands the coat over, trying to keep invisible and unimportant and silent. He looks at his owner, his victor, and it's the first time he's really seen the man up close. There are three very faint white marks where his skin had been torn by the muttations. Cato looks taller than Peeta remembers, and paler too, more ill, somehow. The sadness makes him look old beyond his years, where usually his arrogance hides his weaknesses, his fault lines, and makes him appear boyish and youthful. To indeed be a god, if only for a short while.

Reminded of who he is, somewhat, Cato straightens and his face becomes unreadable again. He heads for the front door, and spares no glance back. All of a sudden, the house is emptier, and much more silent, with no flowers or music, but the horrors of political love, and affection that acts as the flower but remains as the serpent beneath it. Peeta watches where he'd stood for a long time, wading waist-deep in his own thoughts, his desire to help but being paralysed by the marks on his wrist, him being a Surplus.

Up the half-known step, Peeta lingers by the bedroom door again. They both deserve what they're getting, in a way, but that's not who Peeta is, he always far too centred on forgiveness and kindness for his own good. He goes to knock, but stops when he hears that unmistakeable noise that he would sometimes hear from his mother's room, on the worst of occasions.

Clove is crying. Through the door he can hear every sob, and how she gasps, in between for air. Maybe she doesn't realise it, but that right there, those tears and that pain in her chest, sharp and strangely enduring, is her saying 'I love you' back to Cato, even if she doesn't know it yet. Assured, Peeta brings himself to knock.

"Do you need anything?" He asks, in a careful tone of voice. There's no telling what she'll be like: if Clove will become violent or overcome with her emotions. She's a hard woman to predict, and it makes Peeta nervous, unsure of each action he takes around her. After all, why should Clove be on his side? He went against her very basic instructions; he called up for Cato when she begged him not to. There's not likely to be any camaraderie between the two of them at current.

Upon hearing him at the door, Clove tries to muffle her own crying, and act as if she's above it all, above feeling for the tribute she followed close to, and was saved by, and married, and fucks, on occasion. It strikes her as ironic, laying in their bed that smells like her perfume but of him, too, of Cato's own identity. She remembers being able to smell it all over that girl from District 1, the name slips her mind, but the fate doesn't. It felt good, in a wrong kind of way, when she got what was coming to her.

The moment that nest hit the floor, Cato went for her, and her alone. He's built, see, and the stings had to be a lot more concentrated to get to him. Clove has always been small, and thin, and they acted fast on her. He carried her body to the lake and woke her, as soon as it was over, having removed the stingers from her, having made sure she stayed alive. The last girl that flaunted Cato's' attention was pitilessly murdered. How ironic.

Peeta remains outside, and she feels the need to speak to someone, or she'll choke on all of the words and sentiment that needs out of her body right away. Clove sits up and wipes at her eyes, trying to appear in control of the situation. She isn't normally so weepy, but then again, she doesn't very well often faint, either. It is at moments like these when Clove wonders if all of this is even worth it, sealing her future with somebody she isn't even sure she loves by bringing a child into an apparently loveless marriage. She can change her mind at literally any time. While the District has many laws, you don't have to travel far for a miracle cure, where long needles are injected into the swollen bellies of Capitol women seeking an alternative to scandal.

"Did you hear any of that?" She asks, sniffing. There is a pause on the other side of the door. Peeta considers himself.

"That depends." He says, evenly. "Do you think I heard any of it?" Clove finds herself laughing, comforted by somebody else in this empty house, more flowers, and none that bite. At least talking to a Surplus means that she can't be cornered or hurt. Cato always tries to stop the bleeding with a knife, and they both end up getting sliced to bits.

"I think you heard all of it." She says, quietly. "I think you heard every word and you're laughing at us."

Peeta's voice is so soft, and so full of sympathy that Clove cannot be sure he's really sincere. "Why would I laugh at you?" the Surplus asks, and it stuns her, humbles her into silence. She expected a horrible little thing, one that would despise her, and treat her badly whenever Cato wasn't around to serve as a threat. She has forgotten, and forgiven, his minor trespasses.

"People are starving in your District." She says, trying to sound reverent enough, and not flippant. It's hard to, because it is such a casual topic, such a trivial thing here and in the Capitol. Parents chastise their children, and say 'you should eat all of your dinner, people in poor Districts have nothing to eat at all. You should be grateful'. Hearing Peeta's kindness, she feels ashamed, and vows to herself never to say that to any child of hers.

Suddenly, he pushes on the door, and appears in the arch, looking small, but always so steady. Clove turns to face him, pulling the covers around herself. Her gaze softens a little. She isn't so obnoxious, or bloody-minded by nature, it's something Cato brings out in her. She doesn't know why, or even if she could yell any louder, shout any fiercer. It's because neither of them know how to say anything else.

"Well, I'm not laughing," He says, neatly. Clove nods, swallowing that awful feeling Cato had left her with. She stares at him, nearly confused.

"No," She says, a bit lost. "You're not." She cuts her eyes from side to side before speaking again. "Is Cato gone?" Peeta nods and it gives leave for her to become even more misty-eyed. She covers her eyes for a second and sniffs. "God help us if he's drinking." She says.

"What happens if he's drinking?" Clove smiles faintly. She avoids answering the question, and Peeta lets her.

"It's so easy to forget that people marry for love, in poorer Districts." Her voice is dreamlike and dangerous. Peeta shifts, and her gaze returns to him, soft and interested. If he shuts his eyes and thinks hard enough, he can pretend that he's among friends again, that Clove couldn't have him strung him up over a tree so fast it's not even funny. Peeta sits on the edge of the bed.

"What did you marry Cato for?" Because he really doesn't know. He assumed it was love, when the Games was aired, and they were, without airs, the lovers of District 2 that nobody really liked but everybody secretly rooted for. Hope, and love, above all things, was the only thing stronger than death. When Clove had screamed for Cato, his love had overtaken his fear of dying, and he'd cleared Thresh away, forgotten all about poor, poor Katniss. In that moment they were perfect. And they were in love.

Clove shrugs. "It doesn't matter now." She pats her ever-so-slightly-distended stomach, by way of illustrating her conundrum. Her hands have been tied before, but not like this, not with wire that tears and burns her flesh night and day.

"Of course it matters." Peeta says, sounding strangely certain. He frowns. "You can't tell me you didn't love him at some point."

"I don't know!" Clove snaps. It makes Peeta jump back, and remember His Place. Suddenly, he isn't so comforting, but trying to seem small, and insignificant. Sighing, Clove runs a hand through her fringe. "I don't know." She exhales. "And what would be the point? He's always at the academy, or in town,." Peeta smiles.

"We don't have that distraction, back home." It makes Clove laugh, again.

"I guess you don't." She says. Then, she processes his words and points a finger at him. "Hey, you  _were_  listening!" Peeta holds up his hands.

"Even if I wasn't, it's still obvious." He explains, with this look on his face that's patient. Peeta smells of grain, not flowers, but flour. "It's like back home," his eyes become glassy with the memory, and Clove dares not interrupt. "Maybe I've never been caught, but everybody knows I secretly love throwing oranges at our priest. Hell, even the priest knows." Thinking about home has both of them in a painful silence. Clove looks down at her hands, anywhere but Peeta, and finally finds the courage to speak.

"You must be anxious to get back." She mumbles. Peeta considers it, but when he's speaking, something else comes out of his mouth.

"You'd be surprised."

At exactly thirty-three minutes to four in the morning, the front door goes.

Peeta hears Cato treading up the stairs, more like staggering, silent, but stinking of something clear the peacekeepers drink and the damp, uncut hair of graves. He staggers upstairs and heaves the bedroom door open, looking around, seeking worthier prey than the darkness he is left with. The sheets remain empty and offering no comfort to him, so he turns away, unafraid to call her name, but unsre what she'll do.

He finds he, a few minutes later, looking out of the large window in the kitchen, at the large garden where there are no flowers growing, just grass. It takes a while for Clove to notice him, but the smell of alcohol hits her first and she spins, recognising Cat, his face pale with grief and his eyes swimming with everything he's been drinking. She will not meet them, or budge an inch.

"I don't want you here if you're drunk." Clove said, coldly. She looks down at the floor, and then finally up at Cato, who has the temerity to wear this horrible little smile, even now. "You should leave."

He takes a bold, uneasy step closer, and Clove tenses up, becoming terrified which pushes her to anger. "I said get out!" She snaps. But he doesn't permit her anything. His eyes are all red, and they roll, dramatically, as if somehow bored.

"Not until I've paid my whore." Cato stands right up next to her, so close that she can feel his breathing and taste what he's been drinking. The nightmares have driven him to barbiturates, some might in the week and his face looks somehow distorted because of it. His glare confuses her memory of the salient. All eyes are ice, but nothing happens.

Clove points a nasty finger at him. "I don't want you here, Cato." He laughs, mirthlessly.

"All I have to do is reach out and squeeze." He reminds her.

"You wouldn't dare." Clove hisses. She watches him carefully, aware of the storm on the verge of raging outside and that for some reason there are no flowers in their hose and it bothers her, it drivers her crazy and Clove is so busy thinking that she barely notices one of Cato's colossal hands pinning her against the wall until it's too late.

Furious, she spits at him. And like a cheap elastic band, Cato snaps.

In a moment Clove has gone from being pinned against the wall to being at least two feet off of the floor, supported only by the hand fixed around her windpipe. Her body thrashes desperately, and she batters her legs against Cato, and the wall with each desperate bucking, to be free of his grasp. It has no effect at all and pretty soon Clove is screaming bloody murder, clawing at his hands and arms so hard that he's bleeding a fair amount pretty quickly.

"Let me go!" She screams, eyes wild with terror, her face growing pinker and then redder and then purple as the air gets stuck in her lungs that feel like they are on the verge of exploding. All the while Cato's mouth is open, like he's unable to shut it, a manic sort of smile as if he finds her pain and torment pleasurable. He seems deaf to her pleas, and to the blood on his hands and arms. "Cato—please-"

His face turns dark and he's finally able to shut his mouth before speaking. "You made me believe that you loved me!" He screams. "I saved your life, from all of those other tributes, and from the tracker-" clove splutters and kicks her legs wildly to try and get free.

"Then I wish I were dead!" She howls, barely able to get enough air to fuel her howls. "I wish I were dead like them!"

It's as if somebody has said the magic words, and Cato lifts his other hand to her throat. He means to end it now.

"Peeta!" She screams out, in a feeble attempt to get some help. It only serves to anger Cato, who pulls her away from the wall before driving her back into it and growling. "Peeta!" Her voice is so weak, and her strugglings are becoming more and more pathetic. Cato knows he should let her go, but he cannot seem to wrestle control of his hand away from his emotions.

Clove's eyes are starting to flutter, and her face is livid. For a second, Cato thinks he's killed her.

Out of the darkness, he feels another pair of hands tear him away from her by the shoulders and Clove drops onto the marble kitchen floor, making the most inhuman noises, gasping for air and life to return to her.

"Peeta," She gasps out once more. Cato turns, his eyes blazing, at whoever dares interrupt him.

No mockingjays sing tonight. Clove can only watch.


	7. Act 2, Scene 4

Once, when Clove was fifteen, she fell from a scaffold at the academy and landed on her back. All of the air had rushed from her lungs and she remained motionless for a literal ten minutes, choking out, gasping for air as blood pooled in the back of her mouth, cutting off her breathing. That was long ago, and Clove thought she had long forgotten about it.

Only now does the sensation come running back.

By instinct, her body goes limp and she curls up. The air is too thin. She cannot seem to stomach it. The floor is dark and marble, streaks of white running through the cream and now Clove is spluttering, flecks of stark red coughed up on to the stone floor. The District of masonry, she remembers, and it seems so ironic that they called Cato vicious and carved out of stone, but she never laughs. Clove is sure she'll die. Her body shudders with desperate attempts at respiration, but it's no good.

Across the marble, Cato is unrecognizable. His body is shaking, but Clove isn't scared of that, it's his eyes. All of a sudden, the home around them fades and she's presented with the uncut hair of graves, the arena, and Cato stands over the body of a tribute, looking unsure of his reality. The blue has become soulless, nothing there to trade sympathy for rationality with.

Suddenly furious, Cato turns to see his interruption. The only thing that saved Clove from asphyxiation.

Peeta is too small to stand there, looking like that. He's too tiny to stick his chin out in defiance with this warm, oceanic eyes that say 'come here and say that' in less words, because the trouble is, Cato will, he'll march over and that will be it. Why isn't Peeta afraid? The baker boy, this insignificant, secondary Surplus, standing before a victory with raised hands, with this challenge written all over him.

For a second, his eyes flick to Clove and he seems actually happy, a whisper of a smile on his face when he's certain she's breathing. What does that look mean, and what should she make of it, when his eyes offer her flowers, this fragile blue all stuck with wreath (as his will son be, dead)?

He's still looking at her when Cato reacts. And Peeta is bleeding before he falls onto his shins.

Clove cries out, some unintelligible noise, still struggling with the air that remains devoid of oxygen. She cannot close her eyes to the horrors before her, and now Peeta is wiping at his mouth, teeth yellow with the plasma of his blood. He looks to Clove again, just this tiny sideways glance, and God's bread, Cato just flares up.

One of his enormous hands closes around Peeta's throat, but in a quick moment of panic, the smaller boy dips his head and sinks his teeth into Cato's wrist, so hard that it draws blood. It dribbles down Cato's arm and pools at Peeta's lips, making him some kind of monster, grotesque in the light, a confused memory. The victor cries out, bringing his other arm around and bringing it down so hard that Peeta is thrown against a countertop, the sharp of his cheekbone the first thing to make a blood-curling  _crack_.

The rest of the boy's body seems to crumble, and he sinks against the door of the cupboard, an ugly gash following across the bridge of his nose. One of his eyes, is shut, the left one, twitching slightly in the pain. Soon, his flesh will be an ugly purple and swollen to the point of blinding him. Peeta spits the blood in his mouth out onto the marble floor and looks back up at Cato, who clearly isn't done, who seems to extract pleasure from this war.

Clove tries to pull herself up from the floor, but remains paralyzed, laying, watching. And still, against all wishes, Peeta is still watching her.

By the collar of his now-crimson specked shirt, Cato pulls the boy to standing and glares at him, considering what to do with helpless, worthless prey. Peeta struggles desperately, hard enough that he brings a hand across Cato's face and gouges, drawing blood again, right across those murderous blues. In a second, he's let to the floor as Cato staggers backwards, screaming profanities.

The boy scurries backwards on his feet, trying to come up with some kind of solution. For the first time, he's not looking at Clove, but he might as well be. She can see the gash across the face is pretty deep, and his eyes are the only thing visible through the ruby visage that gleams in the moonlight. His eye is still closed, weeping salt water, and his lips are strident with blood.

Cato isn't far from him, drawn to full height again, and Clove has seen him stand like that before, all temper. Something in clove breaks and she starts to lose air, scrambling to stand up, to drag herself across the floor somehow and return the debt of her life.

She is feeble. Cato is upon him before she can do anything at all.

Oh, Jesus, she can't tear her eyes away, and Peeta raises a pathetic hand, swinging towards Cato's face, the side that Clove strokes when she whispers to him, if she has ever meant a word of it. His tiny hand is lost in Cato's fist, and he begins to squeeze, lifting Peeta's entire body by just his wrist, dislocating it right away.

The poor boy, alas, is robbed of all of his words. She can see Cato calculating every single bit of pressure he exudes, jaw tight, but smiling maniacally, as if Peeta's helplessness, his abject agony is somehow hilarious.

The boy thrashes his body around and tries desperately to break free of Cato's hold, but it only worsens things, and soon his blue eyes look childish and his face becomes white. He flops like a fish on a line, gasping, throwing his form around from side to side. He's going to die. He's going to die and Cato's going to kill him and then he's going to walk back over to Clove and finish the job because he has lost his mind, poured whiskey on his nightmares until they have become good ideas.  
What makes all of them so sure is that Cato is growling, focused intensely on crushing Peeta until his bones are finer than flour. Clove isn't sure what he's doing to Peeta until she notices the thick, soupy strings of blood threading down Peeta's frail little arm, and how Cato's fingers are caked in the stuff. Over the sound of Peeta's insubstantial little breaths, staccato bursts of agony and trying to stay alive, they can ll hear this telltale crunch.

Clove is certain he's broken every single bone in Peeta's hand.

His eyes are wide, and Peeta can't close his mouth now, trying to drink the ammoniac because he cannot even breathe it, too staggered and too panicked, his eyes fixed on Cato's face, ruined with injury but so pleased, too pleased with this horrible predicament. The victor is too wound up in the feeling of Peeta's blood, steadily coursing down his arm, to even notice the boy's pleas for sympathy, for him to stop. When Peeta finally makes a noise, it s thie pathetic scratching at the back of this throat, the only begging he can do.

"Cato!" Clove rasps, pulling herself towards the both of them, slowly. Cato doesn't seem to hear her, still fixed on destruction. "Cato, let him go." She pleads, but barely, because there are dark marks forming around her throat that match Cato's fingers.

Peeta looks at her for a second, ruddy and covered in sweat and so frail, too fragile and for once Clove feels something, she wants to take him and hide him away from this place, where he does not belong, where there are no flowers.

"Please," She begs him. "Cato, you're going to kill him!" Peeta goes even paler, and his eyes flicker open and closed, overwhelmed with his torment, until he looks like he's going to heave. Cato still hasn't heard her. She needs to do better.

Peeta looks at her again. It wasn't me, says the boy with gun. That same Surplus with his finger in the dam seems to have run off, and flooding is inevitable.

"Stop it!" She wails. "You let him go!" At last, Cato turns, still not letting Peeta up.

"Quiet!" he snaps. His entire face is red, one eye scratched to bleeding, and his entire being shakes with absolute madness and fury beyond anything any of them could have imagined. This isn't who he is. This isn't who Clove once loved.

"You're going to kill him!"

At last, he lets go, turning on Clove, still collapsed on the floor, and holds that same bloody hand up to her. "I should have left you to die!" He screams. Then, at last, he starts to feel and Clove swears she can see something in him die. "That's what you wanted, isn't it?" She says nothing. "Isn't it!"

Behind him, Peeta looks close to passing out. Bones are visible through his hand, mangled pieces of skin hanging off here and there, a mess of unnatural white and pink and red. There is a mangled, unrecognizable mess of flesh where Peeta's hand should be. He sits there, in a daze, just staring at his hand, before he suddenly heaves to the side and vomits.

But he's alive.

Clove thinks she's okay, but then she breaks down into a fit of hysterics, and starts to sob furiously, her throat hoarse from a mixture of shouting and where Cato had grabbed her, and squeezed the life out of her. It's very difficult for a decent man to shout at anybody if they're crying, which is why it's often a good idea to cry when being shouted at by a decent man. It's not Clove's motive here, she simply can't control herself.

In a second, Cato goes from livid to soft, this ethereal side of him finally surfacing.

It seems all the damage he has done to Peeta has given him leave for peace, all of a sudden, so quick to forget Clove's trespasses when she looks so small, and helpless and afraid. He brings her into his chest and fixes his arms around her until she's completely enveloped in him. Cato's less bloody hand rubs her back, and they both try to pretend, they both try to forget it all.

She can still smell the drink on him, but Clove ignores it. Instead, she seeks comfort.

"What did I do?" Cato whispers to her. He looks down at her, his face still dirty with blood. "Are you okay?" She nods, trying to get some space. "Jesus Christ," He murmurs again, and runs a gentle finger along her neck. "I'm sorry," His voice goes from calm to overcome with emotion again, and maybe it;s real or maybe it's the drink but Clove is thanking every single star and god she can think of that he's no longer violent.

Cato pulls her body into his like a child with a teddy bear and moves slowly forwards and backwards, gently, so that she can breathe, and see, so that it calms her down just as well as him. It's only then Clove remembers Peeta, and pushes at Cato.

"Peeta?" She calls out weakly. He looks up at her, still in a daze, his mangled hand held close to his face as if he still doesn't believe it. His hair is matted with blood, the injury to his eye has started to swell, and he looks so young and helpless that Clove thinks of some tribute she'd put a knife in and wants to die.

What if that boy had been Peeta? Who cares too much, who tries to help, even when faced with death? Looking at his mutilated hand once more, Clove reacts. "Oh, God." She scrambles, slowly, across the kitchen floor and takes Peeta's wrist, trying to keep all of her food down when she examines his worst injury. Peeta looks up at her, still white as death, and stiff like rigor-mortis is setting in.

"Clove-" He whispers.

"Shut up." She says quickly. "Jesus, you've broken every bone in your hand." Peeta chances a look over at Cato, and then screams out as she moves his wrist. They look at eachother again, and Clove tries to keep him from vomiting again or fainting or screaming bloody murder. "You should have laughed at me when you had the chance." She says to him, quietly. Then she turns back to Cato, still out of his senses and shaking. "Cato?"

He can barely look at her. "I didn't mean to hurt you, I sw-"

"Shut up!" Her face is red, and when she shouts she can feel more blood at the back of her mouth. "Get a doctor." Cato stares at her, slightly open-mouthed, and Clove finally feels in control of herself again. "Go!" She cries out again, still more of a croak, from nearly dying. Peeta heaves again, turning to the side and getting out whatever is left in him. Cato scrambles to his feet and takes a few steps, before stopping.

"Clove, I lo-" Her ears are burning, and she doesn't even turn to him.

"Now's not the time." And he goes, knowing that it's best not to argue, staggering off the find help, or a phone, whichever comes first.

Clove is left alone in the dark of the kitchen. Peeta stinks of coppery blood and somehow, still flowers, grain, nature. His eyes are as blue as the Silverflow which runs further north in this District and his face is as ghostly and spectral as the moonlight that quivers through the kitchen window. She can see him, not by that, but by the light in the pantry left on by an angel, the one that now watches, with such patience.

"Why'd you help me?" She asks. It's torn out of her before she can help it. The boy smiles, kindly.

"You were brave," he whispers. "You reminded me of-" his voice catches, and the words that are born in his heart die on his lips as silence, slaughtered youth. "- a friend," The finish is safe, but clove knows better than to ask. She stands, shakily, and helps Peeta to a seat, at the end of the kitchen.

"What a sense of humour you have," She jokes, taking a large glass bowl out of the cupboard and filling it with water. It gets places in front of Peeta and Clove takes his wrist. Peeta yelps. "Don't be so dramatic."

The Surplus nods. "Sorry," He mumbles. "Has he done that before?" Again, Clove avoids the question. She studies Peeta's hand, crushed beyond any use, and then looks at him again. That gaze makes her want to answer, but she remains strong, because she has to. Her loyalties lie with Cato. "Clove." She pulls his wrist again and Peeta hisses.

"Fuck," she mumbles. "I'm sorry." Peeta looks her in the eyes again.

"It's nothing." The calm from which he speaks makes her blood turn to steam.

"You should have kept out of it." She snaps, suddenly, thrusting his hand into the water, and watching him struggle again, trying to remain calm but the agony fighting for control. He trembles, as if there are demons dancing in his body. "You don't Know your Place, Peeta, you had no right to do that-" Clove's words are messy, as if it pains her to lie.

Peeta tries to keep his voice steady, but it jumps with his pain. "He would have killed you-" the boy gasps. "-and I was supposed to let that happen?" Clove digs a nasty finger into his palm, and Peeta nearly screams.

"No!" Clove snaps at him. She slaps him around the face. "You're wrong, Surplus." her voice is ragged and unsteady with her emotions, and it makes her ashamed. "Cato loves me. He loves me and he didn't mean to hurt me." Peeta looks suddenly so betrayed.

"And I suppose you magically love him back, now?" He manages, never looking into her face, but down at the water, misty with blood, where his maimed fingers have become a bit more distinguishable through the mess of tissues and flesh. Clove swallows, caught off guard.

"He's a good man." She whispers. "He is. You can't imagine what Cato has been through," Peeta shrugs with his other arm, wincing a little.

"Y'know-" He takes a glance around the kitchen, but ultimately, at Clove, and she looks so different in the starlight. From where Cato has been, there's some blood on her face, and for a second, when his vision blurs, she looks like the Girl on Fire. But it''s just an apparition. Peeta sighs. "You don't have to stay here because you're pregnant."

"Oh?" Clove gets out, in a shy voice.

"You're not his property." She blushes.

"I know that!" She growls. "What would you have me do, Peeta?" Her eyes beg him. "I'm not exactly up to surviving on my own. The life I have here is comfortable." she insists, trying to reason with herself ore than Peeta. "And Cato loves me. He's good to me, really."

The words float down the hall, and Cato wanders after them, pausing, listening with intent. It's not his place to interrupt.

"And that's why you stay here?" Peeta asks. "For comfort?" Clove growls.

"I stay because-" Quickly, she loses speed. "I stay because I'm safe here. The Capitol can't get to Cato, yet, or the baby." Silence falls for a minute. Peeta ruminates on that, and Cato, still waiting in the hall, wonders about the nature of the sentiment, not calm enough or sober enough to feel the sting just yet. It's a saving grace.

"Back home," Peeta begins. "We don't get the option of comfort." He looks up at Clove. "you live for love or you die alone."

Clove looks him in the eyes. "Which are you?"

Clear as day, Cato hears the boy answer, not with words or smiles, but with a kiss that doesn't belong to him. Worse than that? Clove kisses back.


	8. Act 2, Scene 5

Four weeks.

Four weeks, twenty-eight days, six hundred and seventy-two hours. Whichever way Clove tries to look at it, that same body to time still seems stupidly big. This is how long it has been since she last touched Peeta. Not even a handshake has passed between the two of them to damn near forty-thousand, three-hundred and twenty minutes.

That isn't to say she hasn't been thinking about touching, because if she thinks and doesn't actually touch there isn't any harm done either which way and then when Cato joins her at night he can't seem anything on her skin. As if it's his business who has been touching her skin, anyway. So, Clove remains cold and aloof, but in her mind, Peeta's warm hands are always on hers. Instead, of course, she only sometimes catches his warm eyes on her and they look so shy, and so sweet.

And Peeta? He says not a word of guidance either which way.

Clove thinks it's because Peeta despises her, that he only spared her time because she saved the rest of him (his hand remains in a splint, and it will do for a while). Now that they don't speak, or look, or touch, she feels betrayed. That's only because she's not looking closely enough.

Cato knows. He keeps it to himself, but he knows, and the jealousy makes him sick in the night, the thought of her skin on Peeta's makes him  _nauseous nauseous nauseous._  Most of the time, Clove is asleep when Cato joins her, he slips into the cold sheets behind her and wonders why he can no longer smell violets or her tulip perfume. It would seem all of the flowers are dead, and they only grow under the gaze of that Surplus, his useless eyes give them leave to bloom.

So, every time he's sure they will be alone together, he grabs his coat, even though it's warm, and then the Surplus by the back of the collar. Cato feels it's necessary to make up tasks to have Peeta do, just to keep him from Clove. Peeta hasn't seen all that he has seen, that boy has done nothing and she falls so fast into lust for him when Cato bleeds, he dreams the most horrible things, and gets not a glance either way. Not even a lie, a little white lie that would have saved her from this.

"C'mon, Loverboy." He barks to the Surplus, that jumps to attention, heading out to run some useless errand. Of course, he only has to mutter that telltale moniker and then Peeta knows that Cato was listening. The Surplus is plenty smart, they both know it, he keeps his head down because defiance has only caused him injuries.

When Peeta has left, Cato turns to find Clove all alone, reading, doing some mundane task, and he smiles at her, even though his face is ripe with cuts from his recent scuffle, and his eye is still half-shut from the scratches. Clove holds his gaze for no longer than a minute, considering him, before dropping her eyes again.

How have they come so far from the 'star-crossed lovers of District 2'?

Cato is a victor, by nature. He isn't used to coming in second, and it doesn't take long before he goes looking for answers. What he doesn't realize, though, is that Clove does, too.

In the middle of the night, she finds that she can't sleep, so she heads down into the sitting room, where the lights are off, and she can at last be alone. It's too hot to sleep, and in this weather, it can't be long before Cato follows after her, with the worst of dreams. He has the same one, over and over, of coming too late to the feast, at the cornucopia. He dreams that he kneels besides her body, spear in hand, pleading for Clove to stay alive, so that he can get her home and safe. Then he wakes.

Other times, Cato dreams about coming back to life, just to look for clove, and that he'll be a mason and he'll lay the foundations for her house, and their eyes will meet once but not again and it kills him. And after that, he'll come back as a butterfly and land in the palm of her hand but she'll brush him away the the rejection kills him, he dies early and when they bury him they put coins over his eyes but he uses them as train fare just to come back and looks for her.

That's why, when Cato wakes, he holds on a little too tightly.

Not tonight, of course, because it's warm and Clove needs her space to think. It's impossible, quite literally impossible, to try and summarize how to feel about the future and love and the fleeting kiss of the Surplus called Peeta when Cato's lips are against her neck and his arms are around her stomach and she's aware of how there are still some flowers on the smell of Cato's skin, if only she can will them to grow. This isn't fair, she thinks, because she's happy, and she has been given so much. It can all be taken away in a second.

The clock is laughing in her face, signaling the end of the midnight hour, moving it on to the next day. Sometimes Clove hears the clock chiming in her sleep, and other times she sees that light in the pantry, that same angel, and his eyes, fiery with defiance and a youth independent of age. For the moment, she actually wants to be alone, with her cold drink of some kind of juice. She sips and tries to think, but all that's in her head is Cato, and Peeta, and the unhappy accident that binds her here.

Deep in thought, she doesn't notice the angel until he notices her first. This angel leaves the light on, and then steps back, horrified.

"I'm sorry," Peeta says, quickly, fumbling against the wall with his still-broken hand. It's in a complicated split, and the skin there is unnaturally pale from grafting. "I didn't know you were awake." For some reason, that makes sense in the moment, Clove stands up, her trance broken, and the shards of it are raining down on her like diamonds.

"It's okay," She says. It's only then she remembers to sit down, and she does trying to look casual and graceful, but the truth is, she can feel every second of Peeta looking at her, his eyes the first contact she's shared with him in so long. It's not that there's anything wrong with Cato, his arms are the best to wake from dreams in, but Peeta is gentler. Always steady, and eh offers flowers, somehow. "I thought you'd be asleep."

Peeta shrugs. "Dreams." It strikes Clove as odd: she often forgets to think of Peeta as human, with his won fears and desires. She straightens and takes another sip, her eyes inviting the boy to sit. He stays in the arch of the wall, as if her presence makes him nervous.

"Of what?" She asks. It makes him embarrassed. He even blushes, heaven forbid, and it makes her remember that he still is only a boy. At least Clove can have a few years to her name, a few experiences that make her a bit older. Peeta is straight from his mother's breast, it seems.

"It changes," He hesitates, trying to remain ambiguous. He can tell by the look on Clove's face that she isn't going to allow it so easily. "I dream about getting reaped, sometimes." It would be insensitive to laugh, so Clove smiles at him.

"Oh," She whispers. "It's not all that bad." And instead of remaining so glum, Peeta shakes his head and laughs a bit, like it's funny. Clove doesn't see the jokes, but she sees Peeta's smile and then she thinks of those flowers in the scent of Cato's skin and the crossroads are like quicksand, consuming her. "What, you never wanted to see any of the world outside of your District?"

Peeta smiles again. "Alive, certainly." That strikes Clove as odd. She doesn't know how to be around people that aren't casual with the idea of the Games, that aren't 'Careers'. Because, truth be told, that's all she has been surrounded by her whole life and being afraid was always something people laughed at you for. Nobody is laughing here.

"What makes you think you'd die?" She asks in a slow voice, taking another sip from her drink. His face becomes fixed with concentration, lines appearing on his forehead, beneath the yellow hair, like wheat. Cato's hair is wheaty, too, and he's beautiful and pale, like him. But Cato is bigger, and stronger, and he only speaks because he can.

"For starters, I wouldn't have you to pull Cato off of me." That makes Clove laugh. But then she realizes that Cato's name is there used to represent any murderer, or victor of the games and she starts to feel a little less comfortable. She tries to remember the arena, and then Peeta, but the two don't sit happy together, and she can't divorce the idea of the Games from Cato, holding her on the Cornucopia, looking so unlike himself.

"That, and I couldn't exactly bake anybody out of the arena." Clove shakes away the nerves, and tries on another smile. It comes easily, and she wonders if she really means it.

"It's not like you think it is." She sighs.

"Things rarely are," Peeta hedges, and his face looks so kind, he looks so inviting that anybody could just lean in and-

Clove looks up at Peeta and she recognizes the expression on his face, that same look she has seen before, and anything the two of them feel, resentment or hate or friendship, is just as dangerous,. The Capitol and the people must believe Clove and Cato are still madly in love, and Cato has to be sure that Clove has eyes for nobody at all if they are not for him.

"Surplus," She starts off, coarsely. When she calls him like that, they both know she's trying to remind him of his Place and her own authority. "I fear I'm giving you the wrong impression of what-" She fumbles for words. Peeta is looking at her some more. Oh, crucified Christ, how can anyone hope to think when he's looking at her like that, face fixed in partial concern, hair swept over his face, one eye closed from injury? "This isn't what I'm supposed to-"

Peeta takes a sharp breath in. "I wouldn't know what a married woman does or doesn't do, Miss." For some reason, it hurts, some of the flowers are trampled, because Clove doesn't want to be 'miss', but she also isn't sure if she wants to be something else to Cato, her Cato, who has nightmares and will wake along, terrified for the very first time in his life.

"I can't sleep." Clove says. She wants to explain that this isn't her attempt at talking to Peeta, or craving his attention, because she doesn't. He is, however, a sparkling conversationalist, and she would listen to him reading a phonebook, just to hear him speak. But that's not why she's awake and downstairs, she swears!

Slowly, with this unspoken majesty, Peeta takes the seat across from her. He looks frailer, and skinnier and smaller than Clove remembers. She draws up her knees up to her chest and sprawls out in the chair a bit. There's no way to get comfortable in this house. The place feels emptier and emptier and Cato's arms get tighter and tighter and it's just everything here. The too-rich Capitol food and the too-large cushions and the ornamented plates and the people, too heavy, and everybody who ever watched the Games here, with their many beautiful possessions (that they like to number with Cato and Clove).

"You want some tea?" Peeta asks. "Whenever I couldn't sleep, my Dad used to make me some, and tell me a story." His eyes are glassy with the memory, and for a second, it's obvious he isn't here, in District 2, but back home, at the bakery, in the dead of night where he's just a kid, hearing about things too baffling to be real. Clove reminds herself that she isn't the one who sold him into being a Surplus, she merely bought him. But it doesn't make her feel a whole lot better.

"That'd be nice." She says, simply. Peeta snaps out of his reverie and smiles. It's that look on his face that convinces Clove that, no, she doesn't want to kiss him again, but she does want to keep listening.

Peeta rises, and heads towards the kitchen. A few minutes later, he comes back with some form of tea, Clove isn't very sure, to be honest. Each District has it's own varieties, and now that Peeta does most of the shopping, in the markets and all, there's no being sure. He sets them down on the coffee table, and looks up, smiling. As soon as he focuses, something knocks the smile right off of his face.  
"Your hair-" he says, in a tiny voice. "You're wearing it in a plait." Clove nods, carefully. Peeta backs into his chair, doing everything he can to try to forget that he's noticed, keeping his mouth shut so he doesn't mumble  _her_ name and have the nightmare return to him.

"Thank you." Clove says, sharply. "For the tea," But what she really means is something else entirely, and she figures the time to start being grateful is now. "And for saving me –the other night, I mean." Peeta shrugs.

"All part of the job." his modesty is irritating.

"I might have died." Clove counters, scowling. Not even her scowl can repress Peeta, who smiles at her again, totally removed from the memory, and from that feeling he gets when he sees the dark hair pulled down her back.

"Dying is as good an excuse as any to start living." Peeta says suddenly. It's torn out of him, and when he sees Clove's perplexity, he just smiles, like it's normal, and says "Wouldn't you say?" She can only nod.

It goes silent for a long time, and then she looks up at him. "What stories were you told?"

And Peeta smiles again. He reaches into his lap and hold his hand, pretending that's he's holding her. That very same moment, Clove reaches behind her back, and does the same.

It takes another week before Clove notices it. The way Peeta has become like the furniture of the house. Every night, she goes down at midnight, feigning sleeplessness, just for the tea, and the stories, and for him. Peeta's eyes are on fire, his soul bleeds through every damn syllable when he speaks, and it makes Clove feel like she wants to stay here.

Afterward, she goes back upstairs, to Cato, and he doesn't wake until she lips under one of his heavy arms. She still doesn't ever touch Peeta, and it makes her look forward to speaking with the boy instead, and then going back to Cato, who has always been surprisingly affectionate, always up for just laying there, with Clove next to him.

"Move up," She mumbles, as she slips in besides him, warm from the tea and sleepy from the story and still holding her own hand and thinking about her own lucky. Her movement is enough to pull Cato out of his half-sleep and he sits up for a second, freeing up room for her, before winding his hands round her waist and onto her stomach, pressing his nose under her ear and breathing in the smell of violets that seems present again, if faint.

"Can't sleep?" He asks, in a soft voice, and he's been so gently as of recent, Clove has to wonder if it's because of his guilt over strangling her, or for actually feeling something.

It is, of course, because Cato knows, and he does love Clove. He's not about to lose her to some  _Surplus_.

Clove shakes her head. "Can't get tired."

For all that they think him brutal and bloodthirsty, he can never quite say no to Clove. That's why he bought her the lion carving on the train up, and why he never argued, not once, when she was picking their Surplus. It's one of his only weaknesses –all she has to do is look at him with those sweet, dark eyes and ask, and Cato will do anything in his power to make her happy. They are both from quite affluent families, and Cato was very aware when they married that they were both spoiled, and shallow. But, looking at her, he knew it was exactly what he needed.

So when Cato turns to her and says "What do you need?", he means it. Clove sighs, and adjusts herself. There's no honest way to compare Peeta, with his words and his eyes, to Cato. Here, his arms are tucked around her stomach and it reminds her that even if she did love Peeta, which she is almost certain she does (totally, mostly, sort of) not, it won't even matter in months to come, because they're all going to have something on their hands they can do nothing about.

"Tell me a story." Clove asks, simply. It sounds silly to anybody other than Peeta.

"Well,  _darling_ -" She interrupts.

"And we're out of tea, so you're gonna need to get us some." Cato frowns, closing his eyes for a second, wanting his dreamless sleep back but wanting Clove more, so lovely, and thin and perfect. He dreams of her most, of losing her and loving her, and he wakes up squeezing the life out of her because even if Clove doesn't love him he will never let go.

" _Sweetheart_ , you don't drink tea," He laughs, Clove elbows him in the solar plexus, all of the air rushing from his lungs.

"I do, actually," She says, smiling at her handiwork. "So you'll have to remember it, you  _ass._ " Cato starts to laugh, too, raspy and breathless, but he recovers quickly and sighs. Clove can feel his cool breath and the hair on her neck tingle, reacting. She could stay like this forever, pretending that Peeta isn't downstairs somewhere, having his own nightmares. "Anyway."

"Anyway."

Clove nudges him, gentler, and thinks about kissing him. "A story?" Cato laughs, and is about to shake his head when Clove says something, innocent enough, that makes his face go harder than if he's been punched in the gut. "I can always have Peeta tell me one." Quickly, Cato recovers.

"He's from an outline District,  _dearest._  They tell stories about goats." Clove laughs, and then holds up a hand.

"Only the ones that have slain dragons."

"Fine." Cato says, yawning. He leans his head back against the pillow and tries to think. He was never much for stories at school, and his parents only told him about Games strategies, so the only things Cato can think to tell are his own dreams, and it seems too personal, like somebody has slipped their hand between his ribs and grabbed onto whatever they can find. "Anything to stop you blabbering on about goats, sunshine."

"I'll be good," Clove says, impudently. Cato kisses her on the shoulder.

"Sit pretty and do your job."

She smirks. "I could kill you right now." Which only serves to make Cato grin.

"Oh?" He laughs. "Right now?" Clove nods.

"The tragedy is that I haven't,  _honey_." It's so natural to fall back into this routine. It feels good, too, and Cato has missed all of her cheap shots and jabs. All of them lower her guard a little, they make her open to being kinder, when really she's so harsh. He yawns again, breathing in her tulip perfume and rubbing small circles on her tummy, having kept absolutely silent about his excitement.

It was never a question he had ever asked Clove, nor she him. After the Games, they spent a lot of time in each others beds and between eachother's thighs, and that was that. Neither of them had even dreamed of Clove getting pregnant: that had just happened, so suddenly. They both know that Clove isn't at all nurturing by nature, and to a large extent, neither is Cato. But he's still pleased, secretly. He still smiles about it when Clove isn't there to smack him.

She looks at him expectantly. And he begins.

"Okay," He yawns. Clove looks skeptical. "Well, in mythology, people were supposed to have four arms and four legs and two heads and all the rest of it-"

She snorts. "Not a comedy, then?" Cato makes a face.

"You want to hear this or not?" She laughs.

"Go on, then." Because, secretly, this is her only means of comparison. Son far, though, Peeta has the lead.

"So, anyway. Four arms and legs and that," Cato sighs, stretching, tired. "The gods were scared we'd be too powerful, to they split us in half. Two arms and legs and stuff. Like we are now." Clove nods, not particularly drawn in. "And the whole point of our lives is to search for our other half, because when we do we're supposed to be complete. But it doesn't always work out."

Clove sighs. "Scoring high marks for originality,  _love_." Cato clicks his tongue.

"I haven't started yet." He grumbles.

She looks at him, and Cato feels, for the first time, he may not be good enough.

"We lived in Egypt." He murmurs. "You were the Pharaoh's daughter, and I was his slave, and loving you lead to me dead." It comes straight out of his dream, and his voice is rushed and overcome with all of the things he has felt. It can't stop, like bleeding, and Clove is frozen, unsure of what the words mean, or if there are flowers growing in this battlefield. "They claimed that I seduced you." he tells her. "And after they stole my life I was resurrected as a mason."

His arms grow tighter around her. Clove feels herself go hollow inside, just liked she did with Peeta, and in the games, when he had come for her, and saved her.

"I laid the foundation for your house. We met eyes-" he sucks in a breath. "-for two seconds but then you left and I never saw you again and I died." Clove shuts her eyes, and tries never to think of him, her Cato, bulletproof and invincible, ever dying or even weak.

"I came back," He whispers. "I came back as a caterpillar. I turned into a butterfly and I landed in the palm of your hand, you brushed me away and the rejection-" There's nothing left in Cato's lungs and he takes another lungful of air before slicing open his chest and spilling more blood into the ink where his love writes. "- _killed me_."

"But I woke." Cato says, quickly. "I came back just to look for you. I left notes in stupid places hoping you would find them –I carved our names in trees and prayed that it would jog your memory –I used to go searching for you, hoping that you were looking for me but you..." He closes his eyes. "You weren't and I _died –I died early.._."

If Clove could breathe, she might cry.

"I died young with breadcrumbs in my hands, just hoping you would find me so they buried me and when they did-" he laughs, breathlessly. "-when they buried me they put these coins over my eyes and I woke up and used them as fare just to come back-"

He closes his eyes again, ashamed. "Just to come back and  _look for you_."

"Cato." Clove gets out, unsure if she'll cry or not, and she tries her hardest not to, she won't give him that power.

He looks at her, opening his eyes. Maybe it's a lie, or maybe it's the truth but before she can help it the words come up and out like breathing.

"I love you, Cato." She says. The room swells with violets and for the first time in ages, she hears his voice crack with a rare vulnerability.

"I love you, too."


	9. Act 3, Scene 1

It all happens very quickly.

Weeks pass, again, and it starts to get warmer and warmer and all of a sudden, it's the start of the summer. Nights are brief and afternoons are long and lazy, Clove sits in the garden and puzzles over the time of year. Capitol folk flit throughout the city, and Careers all over the District brace themselves in both anticipation and horror.

Summer, she remembers. Let the Games begin.

Has it already been a year since Cato volunteered, from the audience of the select few, bigger and stronger and less alive than all of them? It seems a lifetime ago, when Clove was young, when she wasn't bound to anybody but the District, told again and again that she was going to make them proud, that she should learn everything about her opponent, rival, Cato, but keep him at arm's length. On the train up to the Capitol, they fucked, rough and unceremonious and desperate, and Cato had been different.

"I'll do it quick, if I have to." He'd said. And Clove adjusted against his body and gritted her teeth and gasped, trying to quiet herself. She felt herself nod, and her toes were already curling.

"Through the heart." She had said, because she didn't want to die.

That's the irony of life, of course. Both of them died, in a way. They crawled out of that grave as other people, less alive, but broken in the softest places. Clove thinks that she only knows what it is to be alive now because she had skirted death with him. Sometimes, when they meet eyes, she can still see it, that eagerness, that promise. Cato would still, if she asked him, do her quick through the heart so that she could look at him until she died.

Her heart has always been the first thing to go. Even now, it is poisonous to her, it makes her unsure, and she can't afford to be unsure when there are the games coming up. Some ambitious little machine needs a shove in the right direction, even if Clove isn't exactly the one to give it. She knows that this is just another excuse for Cato to mess with her, using lives as Proxy. He's always been like that: if he can't have personal glory he wants everybody else to suffer.

It's not just that it's Hunger Games season that bothers her. (I mean, it happens every year, and if Clove invested herself in every tribute, every year, she'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.) What really gets her isn't the Games themselves, but everything around that. The idea of having to mentor somebody isn't exactly pleasant. Having to sit for Caesar Flickerman another time makes her feel a bit lightheaded. It's just the Capitol. Those too-invested, too-interested strange creatures that babble at her, demanding a convincing love story from the two of them, demanding to know every single detail about their lives together.

She doesn't want them knowing about Peeta at all; because they'll want him glamourized, made into something he's not. Clove is certain she doesn't want them to know about Cato's scuffle with the Surplus, but most of all her pregnancy. It's getting harder and harder to hide, but the moment even one of them knows, it will be media fodder, everywhere. Even after all of this time, the images of the Capitol-defying 'Star-crossed lovers' still throb through the newsprint curtain in most Districts. There's no escaping it.

All of a sudden, it's two months before the reaping day, and everybody in the District is holding their breath.

Here, it's different. Teenagers in black, built unnaturally, start to swell in numbers, suddenly sprawled all over the town and the parks. In decorated parks they spar, sometimes, with fists and knives and all of the rest. It makes Peeta nervous, and out of place. Back home, the countdown isn't something to celebrate, and it isn't a time for confidence. People start to haggle for less; they let eachother off, because in two months somebody is going to lose a child, along with someone else, and there's nothing to be done. Why train? Even the fittest ones, even the Girl on Fire couldn't have been helped. Even with her sponsors, even with Peeta's heart, love still cannot ever hope to preserve or save-

And now, death keeps the girl in the dark to be his paramour. It's only now Peeta remembers last year, that he thinks on it for more than just a fleeting second, and he thinks that soon, another few are going to be next, even the smart ones, even the ones who deserve to live.

So, things get quieter in the house. Cato spends all his time in a strenuous effort to remove the weaker ones from a select pack of volunteers, each bit as brutish and patriotic as the victors of the previous Games. This year, of course, it's all about pride, because the last Quarter Quell was won by Peeta's District, and that fact lives in shame to most of the Career districts. There are murmurs of dissent amongst the academy trainers, of course, wondering what the circumstances are going to be. Last time, there were twice as many tributes. Who will they send to their death, that isn't the District's children?

Peeta will be returning for the two days. Reaping falls on the second day: and being a Surplus means that he doesn't escape being a slip of paper in that ball. Naturally, the odds are in his favour. He's only got to be in there three times, or something equally stupid, and they might change the rules, seeing as it is the third Quarter Quell. Everybody is hoping for something, especially back home, that will save their children from being sped down the line to death. But love cannot save.

Still, there's plenty of time, and nobody needs care right now.

Clove just dreads the idea of mentoring anybody. She always figured that after marrying Cato, the games might finally be over for them, and they could avoid the Capitol and live in peace. She thinks of her stylists, and how they'll eat up the news of the baby with a silver spoon and want to show it off to the world. No, Clove is firm. It's too personal, and it's too important. No, not with all of those people.

Every night, she treads down the stairs at midnight, leaving Cato, who sleeps heavy, worn out from his day, and finds Peeta waiting for her. They still never touch. Ever. As if it's some sort of betrayal. Other than that, the talking is open, and maybe it's a strange way of saying, but Clove could listen to him for hours. Peeta isn't much to look at, overall, but the way he speaks, he could move a crowd to revolution with but a word. There's this unspoken mastery to him; his opinions are law,, and people always feel the burning desire to impress him or be near him.

Another reason to hate the games: Clove isn't going to like sharing Peeta at all. He belongs to her, and the idea of all these personal stories, these meaningful airs of nothing cannot be given to anybody else.

"I can't complain, I know." She tells Peeta, at another one of their midnight sessions. It's like therapy, and even when Peeta doesn't speak, he sits and she can soak in the warmth he radiates, his listening is worth more, minute for gram, than any gold or diamond. "But this house is too empty to have him away all the time." The boy nods, and sips his drink, thoughtfully.

"He doesn't make sense here." Peeta says, after a very long time. Whenever they speak about Cato, he's always so fastidious; each word is selected with the finickiest finger, as if he cares deeply about how he describes the man. It's not as if Cato would care, the press aren't exactly his biggest fan and words seem to have lost all meaning to him.

"How do you mean?" Clove asks. She doesn't stay up so late, as of recent. She feels tired all of the time and the tea probably isn't helping. Peeta cocks his head to the left, this quirky little habit of his, when he's trying to assess a situation, and how to speak. He is so aware that a word out of line means that he's no longer Peeta, her confidant, but Surplus, useless, helpless.

"He doesn't make sense anywhere but the arena," The boy explains, swallowing. "That's what his whole life has been for, and now it's over, he has to make sense of everything else." That catches her ear rather sharply, and she snaps her eyes onto his, hit with sudden nerves.

"You don't think he'll volunteer, do you?" She says, panicked. It's happened before, only a few times, but in Career Districts, sometimes younger victors can have another shot, and do, because, not unlike Cato, it's where they feel they belong. It's likely that they won't come out again if they do, though. Everybody knows their strategy, and even their allies turn on them. As it it's not enough to win once. Peeta tries to defuse the tension, with another intricate set of words. "Peeta?

"Difficult to say," He tries to remain ambiguous, because he wants to be honest, but he also want to avoid getting Clove worked up. She lets her back rest again the chair and puts a hand on her stomach, as if by instinct. Truth is, of course, she can't really save all of them. (He can't help but wonder who she'd ick, if it came down to it, but he pushes that thought away quickly. That isn't fair.) "Don't worry, Clove, it's the Quell. He's smarter than that."

She smiles to him. "Jesus, I hope so. I won't have that son-of-a-bitch volunteer like last time," Peeta frowns at her.

"Is that why you went? Because he volunteered?" She nods, thinking her reasoning is good and sound. At the time, of course, she was seventeen and in love, desperately and would have followed him anywhere. They had even promised 'do it quick, straight through the heart', and it was their passion, more than luck, that saved them.

It doesn't seem that Peeta agrees.

"I always figured it was just the fickle finger of fate, y'know." He laughs, but then shakes his head. "Nobody at home would ever volunteer," Clove strokes the rim of her cup.

"You never would?"

Peeta shakes his head. "Of course I wouldn't. Nobody would." Clove takes a sip and sighs.

"Katniss did." It's the magic word. Abracadabra! Peeta's jaw snaps shut and his teeth grin like he's a muttation of his usual self. Clove sees him go from relaxed to taught as a bowstring in a minute, and the flowers are being picked and trampled. The boy won't look anywhere but the floor, and he bites his lip so hard that he's going to choke on his own wisdom.

Clove wonders if she should speak, but knows by his silence that it's unwise. It's terrifying: Peeta is usual so quick to forgive and be kind and move on, but right now he's paralysed by a feeling Clove doesn't dare say she knows. What did Girl on Fire mean to him anyway? She feels herself grow jealous of the dead. Were they lovers? Friends? Did Peeta touch Katniss where he'll not even brush skins with Clove?

Finally, she brings the conversation back. "At least you're smart enough to keep out of it."

"Yeah," Peeta echoes her quietly, in a reverie of his own that has left him unnaturally pale. "Smart enough." Clove puts her cup, empty, on the table, and brushes down her lap to indicate that she's going to go up in a minute. Back to Cato, and it seems scaring now that the Reaping is in the distance.

"I just keep wishing there was a way to bring the arena to him." She sighs. "Without him having to leave me here." She covers her eyes with her hand, and groans. When she uncovers them, Peeta is smiling again like has a secret and his pleasure is so tangible, she's practically breathing it in. "What?" Clove says, irritably. She hates not being in on it.

"Just a thought." Peeta says, and already, Clove feels herself infected with his fidgety, can't-seem-to-keep-still cheerfulness over that thought. On the table are two small, marble elephants from the market, and she lifts one, staring at Peeta. He lifts the other, and they touch trunks.

Peeta looks at her, shyly. Clove looks back.

She counts it as their second kiss.

As the countdown continues, everybody starts to get nervous.

Cato finds himself sleepless at night, watching as Clove slips away, without fail, every time the clock reaches midnight. He daren't hold on to her, it's not his place. Instead, he lies in the sheets, feeling each night grow warmer, worrying about the Quell. Even if, heaven forbid, worst came to worst and one (if not both) of them were selected to go back in, Clove would be excused, surely? The Capitol wouldn't send the 'star-crossed lover' to her death, married and pregnant, no, they have grown too used to her.

At the very least, they'll have to mentor this year. Cato can handle that, he spends most of his time at the academy anyway, searching for some worthy opponent. He's not the best, and he's been beaten before, but being a victor means that no student is too quick to say a word against him either way.

It's a strange way of saying he sort of misses the games. It's like Christmas: because all of his life, every single moment of training and studying and fighting, it was all for the games. It didn't last twenty days, and it's been over for nearly a year. What is Cato supposed to do with his life if he can't fight? He fears he's obsolete, with no use to anybody. At least in the arena he had direction and purpose, and at least at the academy, they take him seriously. What happens when he loses his strength, or his speed?

Cato has seen how they deal with race-horses, when their legs get injured. He swears, if he ever becomes crippled or useless, he wishes somebody would shoot him, too.

It's his last thought before he succumbs to sleep, and it doesn't take long before he wishes he didn't.

 _T_ _he sound that starts the dream if of something hitting metal. A body. The noise doesn't ring, drowned out by her breathing,_ _gasping_ _, panting, and Cato knows almost immediately_ _that_ _it is Clove. He looks around_ _the thicket, too panicked to be_ _careful, too scared to scout efficiently. He readies Marvel's spear_ _, taken in death's stead, and tries to find his footing. All too soon, Thresh's voice, just as breathless, begins._ _  
_ _  
Cato knows there's nought he can do but try to save her._ _  
_ _  
"What's you do to that little girl? You kill her?" The boy, bigger than Cato, of District 11, sounds furious. Girl on Fire has fallen silent, and he can only hope she's dead. One less body to deal with to help Clove._ _  
_ _  
Still spluttering for air, and terrified, Clove speaks. "No-" Her voice is so weak. "No, it wasn't me!" Thresh isn't buying it. He keeps her against the Cornucopia, and her feet are battering wildly, just as they did when Cato strangled her, desperate to live, but too shocked and panicked and helpless to call out to him._ _  
_ _  
Cato is running now, he doesn't care who finds him, he's sprinting, spear-in-hand towards the Cornucopia, ready for a fight, ready to save her because what he fears more than death is losing her, having her slip through his fingers like liquid sunshine._ _  
_ _  
_ _"You said her name. I heard you. You kill her?" Something Cato's stomach drops and he thinks he's going to be sick. This was Marvel's doing. Clove needs him. For the first time ever, she needs hi,, and Cato is terrified he won't make it, he'll prove himself useless against Thresh. "You cut her up like you were going to cut up this girl here?"_ _  
_ _  
Their voices are a lot closer now. Cato can feel his heart beating in his mouth, unable to close it in shock and breathlessness and fear. He isn't used to being afraid. And he doesn't like it._ _  
_ _  
"_ _N_ _o! No, I-"_ _his hand fixed tighter around her throat, and Clove, beautiful Clove that Cato was always teasing for a kiss and falling madder and madder in love with, little Clove that beat him at their 100m and never let him forget it, to this day, is having the life squeezed out of her._ _  
_ _  
"Cato!" She screams for him. "Cato!"_ _  
_ _  
This is the first time she has called to him. She no longer cares about seeming weak to the Capitol, or if they'll believe her and Cato truly love. None of that matters. She is being crushed and she's scared, like a helpless child._ _  
_ _  
"Clove!" he calls back, to comfort her. There's no way he can summit the distance. There's no way he can save her._ _  
_ _  
It's too late. Thresh beats her again and again against the Cornucopia, and then drops her body, lifeless and brittle and pathetic to the grassy floor. Her chest heaves in this effort to stay alive, but it's no good. This is how Cato finds her, kneeling, spear-in-hand, screaming._ _  
_ _  
He looks away, unable to bear the sight of her. "Please…" finally, Cato tears his eyes back to her, and he finds her hand,, already growing a bit colder. "N, we're going to be fine, it's nothing, it';s fine, you're going to be fine, Clove, you're-"_ _  
_ _  
Her breathing becomes more slight, and Cato starts to panic._ _  
_ _  
"Don't you dare leave me here! Don't you dare!" Her eyes cannot focus. She can just about reach blindly for his face, but instead brushes his neck. Her arm falls away, the life leaving her. Cato grabs her y the arms, lifting her body up, shaking her. "I swear to God if you leave me here I'm going to-…." His words die on his lips. What will he do? What more can he possibly do to her?_ _  
_ _  
Clove rasps again, and Cato watches her take one final breath._ _  
_ _  
All of her is gone. In his arms, propped up to face him, is nothing more than a corpse, a body, a shell. Her eyes are still open, and her face is still pink. He stares at her for so long, keeps thinking that she'll say something, because her lips are slightly parted and it looks as if she's about to speak._ _  
_ _  
"I always thought your eyes closed when you died, Clove." She cannot respond, of course, but he wants her to, and Cato feels himself break, tear apart like a cracked vessel which sinks to the bottom of the ocean. He brings her body into his, resting his face in the crook of her neck. "Say something,_ _Clove." He sobs. "Please, just say something."_ _  
_ _  
Suddenly angry, he throws her body back down onto the grass._ _  
_ _  
"You answer me, Clove!" He_ _screams_ _his face red with tears and shame, but mostly disbelief. "_ _You answer me now!"_ _  
_ _  
_When he wakes, the bed besides him is still empty, and he is cold with sweat.

"Clove?" He calls out, still unsure how much of his dream had been a lie. His hands are shaking, and there are actual tears streaming down his face. He can still feel the lifeless skin against his hands and he wants to scrub his body raw of the memory, but cannot.

Worst of all, there is no answer.

He tears off the sheets and heads out into the hall, empty, and there are no flowers here, none at all. His voice sounds too uncertain to belong to him. "Clove?"

But the lady seems to hold her tongue.

Cato breaks out into a jog. He throws open every door, every single door on the first floor, shouting for her. She's not anywhere to be found, and Cato is terrified. Each time a room is empty he sees her body again, in the grass by the cornucopia, eyes open, still not moving, as if she's about to speak. It makes him want to vomit, but he cannot even breathe.

"Clove!" Downstairs is empty too. There is no angel, or pantry light, and he hears the words before he can stop himself. "You answer me, Clove!"

"Cato!" A voice in the distance calls out.

With a superhuman speed, he runs, sprints, doesn't breathe until he's emerged from the cool of the house into a blistering day.

The garden is thick with trees, and he recognises the gold, seven-feet-high structure before his body even stops. Clove stands by what must be a cornucopia, where once there were just acres of grass.

"Cato?" She takes a step forward, trepidatious. "Jesus, you look awful-" But, mid-step, she freezes and folds in half.

He wants so desperately to move, but he cannot. Sixty seconds have yet to pass.

This is where he stood in the arena.


	10. Act 3, Scene 2

What Cato does, and what he thinks he's doing often contradict eachother. Especially with Clove. Often with Clove. Always with Clove.

He's sure he can't move. The day before him, blindingly hot, and the sight of what cannot be anything but the arena, sway in and out of his primary focus. Clove's image becomes confused and distorted in his memory, fuzzy from everything else that he sees or might hope ever to lay yes on. Just like the arena, he can see scarce flowers, but trees and grassland and an ugly, metal twisted horn. For whatever reason, maybe the smell of the place, or his own nightmares or perhaps even that Cato has dreamt that same dream four times in a row, four nights in a row, but he remains tense and motionless. Squinting in the sunshine.

Something breaks. A string is cut, this vital one that wrestles control of his body away from rational thought. It's like watching somebody else, a dull rumor of another victor, when Cato finally finds leave to step forward. It all happens like the ballad of some politician, starting so simply, and naturally. He keeps on, towards what has to be a cornucopia, and Clove steps forward, she smiles.

The sun has brought out some of the flecks of brown in her eyes, turning them into gold. It re-dots all of her freckles, and while Cato thinks they are kisses from an angel, he cannot think, he cannot speak. In such a way, he thinks of them as where the angels have spat on her. Why would they kiss her, why would they mourn for a girl that kills?

Everything becomes slow, and underwater.

Clove senses the look on his face a moment too late. Suddenly, the grass in front of Cato's eyes seems to shine, and shimmer explode. The day is as silent as the ocean floor and just as oxygenated. He gaps for air, trying to fight these nightmares, this sensation. His stomach feels squeezed, and all of his organs boiled and slippery and sweaty in his body. A collar of sweat makes beads down his back. As his vision spins, and the trees wind in and out of one another like a hushed conversation between two angels, the words come to him, overheard from the trees.

Episode. An Episode. Having an episode. It doesn't register to Cato that the trees are talking about him, and then from their dancing, haunting vision, a shock of lamplit lemon hair appears. Like the sounds of the fairground, whooshes of voices pass and Cato tries to grab onto them and stuff them into his ears and make sense of them, but he cannot. Clove is the loudest,, in his left, and he turns, the mouth of that cornucopia swallowing her whole, keeping here there in that maw of death. She seems resilient, and grabs for him, taking Cato's face in her hands and speaking.

"Cato?" She sounds distorted, lowers and higher and less real. His ears were blown to bits by the rifle hits and explosions anyway, but her words make no sense. There are others, ones that he doesn't reach in time. "...-it's not February anymore, we have to get older...wake up..." But then, it sounds as if she's singing, nonsense syllables from being out of melodies.

Clove's face becomes different, sharper, starved, and when she opens her mouth Cato is afraid she'll bite him, that's she'll tear out his throat. Her hands feel cold. They shake him, still holding, and Cato shakes her off, with such a force that his eyes cannot follow her. He needs to get older, and escape from here, from her, and the angels in the trees.

This place is not solitary enough. Cato doesn't feel safe here, he feels stung, so certain that the ringing in his ears is the hum of a tracker jacker and he spins wildly to find them, only to see a softer, wheatier yellow, and more hands, gentler ones.

"Get me out." Cato's voice is unrecognizable and fast. There is no breath or soul to it, only fear. "get me out!" His voice breaks and hes pins again, pulling the pale blonde along with him.

"You're fine." The boy says, and Cato focuses enough to see blue, this pure, oceanic cobalt that's so free and ambitious that he's already both drowning and flying just on looking at I. The colour of his hair and the texture is like toast, and just as floury. His words are lies, however doused in honey they might be. Cato strikes him, as hard as he can muster, across the face, and another appears at his side. His girl, his lady, and she looks afraid.

"I didn't know," She whispers, her voice elasticated by his own hallucinations. Cato knows he cannot breathe. The cornucopia that looms looks hungry, and how close he was to falling victim to it. Inn a second, the thing appears to set on fire, no doubt from the bodies inside, of one girl in particular, that sang like a mockingjay and died on Fire. Cato tries to pull back from her, terrified, but Clove keeps on. "You're safe, Cato, nobody is going to hurt you-"

Cato grabs her arms and shakes her. "You get me out!" he wails. Clove starts to whimper, gripped with fear.

"B-but you're home!" She cries out. Of course, the words confused him further and Cato shakes her again, harder.

"Liar!" Clove kicks him hard enough that Cato drops her, staggering backwards, watching as she scuttles on all fours in the grass to get away, knowing that it might well be too late.  
Cato raises an enormous hand. "You did this!"

Clove looks around. "No! No, I didn't-" It's then she looses it.

"Peeta!" She screeches. "Peeta!" And the blonde boy who smells of flowers and bread the only clear thing in this sea of chaos, comes for him.

"I'm so sorry," Is all that the boy has to say. First comes the stiffness, and then comes this silence.

* * *

When Cato comes to, he can hear the sound of a piano winding from down the hall.

It's dark in the bedroom. He can tell by the smell of the sheets (Clove's tulip perfume, honey, and the very slight scent of death) where he is before his eyes open, and then adjust to the cozy darkness. Pinpricks of white-hot lights seep in through the blackout curtains, but the day is as strident as ever on the other side. The piano calls from down the stairs, in the parlour, and nobody has played it in so long, nobody has played it like this  _ever_ , possibly.

There's some blood on the back of Cato's hand. He feels woozy, but the headache will pass. In fact, the music eases the pain, it eases his rage at being here, all alone, and from the notes played, his nightmares don't feel so haunting. That isn't Clove's work, she never plays anymore, and even if she did, it wouldn't be as complicated as this. The melody glides up and down, flitting around like a butterfly, and then soars up, like a bird pasted on wallpaper, but not an unkind comment. The accompanying hand follows after it like a wild dog chasing that same butterfly.

Instead of lingering on all that Cato is so sure is a dream (Clove, that cornucopia, and that arena) he peels back the sheets and sits up, taking a few deep breaths in. By the bed, somebody has left a tall, half-finished glass of water, and some stationery. Cato recognizes his handwriting but has no recollection of writing it. The piece is yellowed with sweat and torn. It reads:

_Are you, Are you  
Coming to the tree  
Where they strung up a man they say murdered three?  
Strange things did happen here  
No stranger would it be-_

Cato can't read the rest. Part of him just about recognizes some of it, but he cannot place if the words are a story or a song. Unlike most of the other Districts, nobody had ever sung to Cato. He tries to think of Clove, whom he has never heard sing, but the idea doesn't fit in his mind. He cannot divorce her from the knives and the Games, and that one desperate fuck on the train up, toes curling, eyes on her, swearing 'I'll do it quick if I have to'.

His headache has been soothes, but something in him still aches, and he draws himself to stand, at last, ignoring the water and heading downstairs. All the while the piece keeps going, and more words enter his head, more memories. Cato stops when he reaches the top of the stairs, winded by hearing Clove screaming in his head, hearing her voice break as she cried for help: 'Peeta! Peeta!'.

He's at the bottom of the stairs when something else hits him. A soft, quivering voice, singing to Cato, only to Cato, each word as a gift but something darker, too.

_Are you, Are you  
Coming to the tree  
Where the dead man called out for his love to flee?_

A song, he thinks, all too late. The words deeply unsettle him, and for some reason all he can think of is Clove, his only joy in this world of horrors, but not in a romantic light at all. There is nothing romantic about this hanging tree for her, because, even though Cato is not the once singing, and Clove is not the one being sung to. They both know.

She will never come to the Hanging Tree.

Cato wanders in to the parlor, careful not to chase the melodic butterfly away, or to scare the creeping, accompanying hand into stillness. The music takes no notice, having the audacity to remain so tragic, and so light and out of grasp, soaring higher and further than anybody in this grey place dares to dream. Breathless, Cato remains in the door, watching the pianist lean in to every note, so sincere, so honest to all of the listeners. It's almost too personal, each of Cato's nightmares threading one note to the next.

It feels as if the pianist is tearing pages out of Cato's soul and reading them out loud, for everybody to make fun of.

Suddenly angry, he demands an answer from the pianist, too absorbed to notice anything else. When he can stand it no longer, Cato steps into the room, loud enough to be heard. And the melody dies suddenly.

Peeta turns, looked terrified, and pulls his hands away from the keys. He speaks, so quietly, and guiltily that Cato himself feels afraid. The boy has plaster stuck under his nose, and blood drying around it. There are no scrapes from their previous encounter.

"I'm so sorry," He says, "I didn't mean to wake you."

They rarely speak, the Surplus and Cato. It's a combination of everything: the boy is from an outline District, he's property and never seems to have anything to say. At least, Cato tried to believe that, even when he knows it not to be true. Peeta is always talking to Clove. They have kissed, which makes him feel angry and confused all at once, but they never touch. Ever. At all. Cato thinks of what he would say, if Peeta were somebody he had to talk to.

"I didn't know you played," He tries, striving for a cold tone. Peeta squirms under his gaze.

"A little." His voice is tight. "Is it yours?" He gestures to the piano, and Cato folds his arms.

"Clove's," It gives him an opportunity to search Peeta's face when his lady is mentioned. The boy is hard to read. He wonders, maybe if he divulges a little more, then it will be easier. But, feeling like this, and seeing Peeta like that, Cato isn't up for another battle. The boy only just got his hand back, and that took some creativity on the surgery side.

Peeta looks at the piano, as if considering something, and then speaks woodenly. "Does she play?"

Cato feels himself stiffen, bending a little at the elbows. "She used to. She hasn't played in a while." All of a sudden, he remembers the last day she played, and his mouth snaps shut, jaw clenching. He doesn't want to talk about it anymore. Especially not to Peeta, who will use the words against him, who Clove probably loves more. Hell, if they touched, she would rather sleep on the surly pantry floor than in Cato's bed. That's Clove for you: she follows the smell of flowers.

Peeta makes a noise of interest and dips his head. "Why did she stop?" Cato feels his face go flush, and Peeta's still looking at him, so innocuously: God's Bread, it makes him furious.

"I don't know," He says, sullenly. Peeta stands up, from the stool.

"Was she good?"

Cato shrugs. "I don't remember anything about it," He says.

He lies. He remembers everything about it. Because Clove had been sick, and in the morning Cato came down to find her singing, for the first time, really signing while she played a song about a girl names Jessica, and how they must get older. It was raining and he had three dreams about the forest, all in a row. In the afternoon, she went out, and Cato stayed in, staring at the keys that waited for her to return. And when she did she cried harder than the rain, shivering violently.

Clove didn't look at Cato at all, save for once. And even then, her eyes were dead, and he smile was cut from a magazine. A sob wracked her as she said 'we're going to have a baby, Cato'. That was the last day she ever played.

Sometimes, Clove sits across the room, and her eyes skirt the keys, her longing to play turning to resentment, and hatred. She will never touch it in the same way she doesn't touch Peeta. There is no physical contact, but there is want and desire and emotion. All of which are catalyzed by the lack of touch.

Cato feels the need to break the silence. "How'd you hurt your nose?" The boy freezes, his eyes turning to ice, and then he raises an eyebrow at Cato, almost offended. It's not as if Cato actually cares how the boy feels, he's a Surplus, and they're not employed to have feelings.

"You don't remember?" Cato's hand, with the blood on the back, stays tucked into him. Is he, by nature, so violent? Trying to remember makes his brain ache. "In the garden?" Cato shakes his head. Peeta sighs.

"For a few weeks, Clove had me working on it.. To make it look like the arena you were in," Cato looks anywhere but the boy. "I rebuilt the cornucopia and re-rooted all the trees. You came outside, and you saw it..." Peeta stretches and adjusts his plain, white shirt before clearing his throat. "Would you like some tea?"

Cato becomes worried, but fights showing it. The Surplus is smart, and he hides his emotions well. Two can play at that. Hell, the whole household does most days, because Clove smiles at Peeta but doesn't touch him and touches Cato but never smiles. "What did I do, Peeta?"

Then, it hits him.

"Where's Clove?" Peeta freezes, halfway in the kitchen, and walks back out. His expression is calm, so Cato clings to that. The Surplus has a kind expression, beneath the small spread of plaster. Why does he try kindness to Cato, who only ever answers in fury? First was his hand. Now, it's his nose. And worst of all, Cato doesn't remember a thing.

"She's down at the hospital." It's a poor choice of words, certainly. Cato feels himself go cold and slack.

"What happened?" Cato's voice crawls out of him, tiny, lifeless, pathetic. Peeta shakes his head, holding out his hands as if to try and calm a wild animal.

"Peace." He begins, oddly. "Peace, she's fine. It was already planned, or something. You didn't hurt her." he sighs to himself, crumpling a bit. The thing is, Cato knows his behavior could be considered a little unusual, at best, the early stages of schizophrenia at worst. But he fears he's powerless to stoop himself, once the Peacekeeper inside of him surfaces.

In a rare moment of total abandonment, Cato speaks in a simple voice. "You kissed her." Peeta's face goes red. It burns fiercer than the Girl on Fire and Cato folds his arms again. He's not sure how to feel, because it isn't jealousy rising in him. The boy nods, at last.

"It's illegal for a Surplus to kiss his owner." Peeta whispers, knowingly. He looks up, expecting to find a threat, taken aback when there is none. Cato laughs at him.

"Then I'll have to arrest her, too. She kissed you back." Peeta frowns, totally disorientated.

"It's not illegal for her to kiss me. Just the other way around." Cato shakes his head and wanders past, into the kitchen, where the Surplus has been working tirelessly. He's good with his hands, Cato knows that.

"Aren't you a ray of sunshine, Loverboy?" He goes over to the sink and washes away the blood on his hands. No more nightmares, he prays, no more nightmares of Clove's death. She has to be alive, to serve as a reminder that the Games has some purpose, that Cato can feel justified in all of those murders. Murder isn't a word that victors normally use, anyway. Peeta stays by the door. "You like your nickname, Surplus?"

The boy similes. "It's getting a tad repetitive." Which cues Cato to take a step forward. As he does so, the boy takes an equally large step back.

"What's the matter, Loverboy? Anybody'd think you don't like me," He jests. Peeta fiddles with his hands.

"Don't be silly." He shoots back. "A sensitive guy like you, never resorting to violence. What's awkward about it?"

None of them mention Clove.

"So, you play the piano?" Peeta nods. "Very well?" he shrugs. "Pretty well?" He nods.

Maybe it's the PTSD. Maybe it's the episode he had earlier but Cato needs an outlet and right now the notes of 'Via Purifico' are falling in his head like raindrops.

"Could you teach me?" He asks. Peeta shrugs.

"I don't know how to teach."

"You kissed me wife," Cato hedges, grinning.

Peeta throws up his hands, also smiling, and heads back to the stool. He cracks his knuckles and settles them in a position. It's going well enough, Cato thinks. It might just be enough to pull his mind away from the arena, and the Surplus is proving useful.

"What can you already play?" The boy asks.

Cato feels so clever when he says. "The Valley song."

But then the smile gets wiped off his face.


	11. Act 3, Scene 3

All of the flowers in the room die.

Cato stares first at the keys of the piano, only slightly yellow with age, and then at Peeta, who's eyes must be some kind of jazz, a dangerous blues. His last words are shot across the room and shiver back to him, still so innocent, potentially lovely, perpetually human. The words of the song flit around in his stomach like paper birds, their sweat running like ink.

Peeta's mouth is sewn shut. His head is filled with her, not those last, desperate moments, but as the Mockingjay, a warrior. She twirls, spinning far (too far for Peeta to spin back towards him). No braids or plaits in her hair, the Capitol and Caesar saw Katniss as Peeta had always done, this small scrap of perfection. They show her face, sometimes, as a memorial, next to the others.

The worst thing is that they show the same picture, and her lips are slightly parted, as if she's about the start singing again. His insides freeze over and go quiet, thinking about the words of the song, the images.

"Loverboy?" It's Cato, her murderer, that snaps Peeta out of his reverie. Maybe he should be angry, maybe he should blame the victor, but he cannot. The Capitol marionette, Cato, that lives in this doll's house, isn't the reason Katniss Everdeen died without a song, without a single flower to her name.

Cato snaps his fingers, impatiently. "C'mon, Loverboy, look sharp." Peeta flinches, refocusing, trying to swallow the bitter taste on his tongue and every single thought of the Girl on Fire, still twirling, and still burning, but in a place he cannot follow to.

"Right," Peeta says, in a tiny voice, moving away from the piano. "Okay. Fine. The Valley Song." Cato takes his place at the piano and looks over his shoulder, unemphatic in every way. It's not as if Peeta is looking for his sympathy, because he will find none and he deserves none, having somewhat captured Clove's attention.

"You're familiar with it, right?" Cato asks, pressing on a key and releasing a note. It sounds nervous, but comes back to him like an old friend.

(And then Cato thinks about how Clove is like the piano, sitting around looking pretty but having nobody to touch her. Peeta wants to, but cannot, and Cato wouldn't know where to begin to get the best from her. So the piano sits glumly, serving a maximum sentence. It's justice, of course, for being so timeless.)

Peeta nods. "It's a lullaby," His voice sounds weaker, but there's nothing at all he can think of doing to reinforce it. "From my District." He explains. "We sing it to children to help them sleep." And then he thinks of that tiny, dark-skinned girl, in a bed of flowers, and the shakiness of Katniss' voice, her notes trembling on the stave as the melody wound its way behind Rue and into the darkness. Into death, where none could follow.

Peeta sang it for Katniss, to himself, through his own tears. Who would sing it for him?

Cato stars down at the piano, suddenly nervous, and mutters. "I might not remember all of it. You tell me if I get it right, okay?"

Not a soul in the room would dare argue with Cato, even if the piano knows something Cato doesn't. The Surplus just nods, eyes on the echo pedal, repeating himself by taking in these gentle breaths. "Okay." he says, at last, and the piece begins.

The intro is clumsy. Like a child, the melody stumbles a bit, looking for purchase, and finding it, eventually. Everything else becomes secondary and irrelevant, apart from the listening, so intense that it becomes an entity in itself. Cato's hands work like sleeping, with great difficulty at first, but then succumbing to the natural way, becoming masterful in confidence.

He murmurs the words to keep the tempo of the adagio.

_Deep in the meadow, under the willow_

_A bed of grass, a soft green pillow_

_Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes_

_And when again they open, the sun will rise._

Peeta's vision fades, until the piano before him is distant, and a pair of grey eyes look into his, no longer grim or sad or macabre, but full of vitality, and hanging on each rest, each syncopation. In this darkness of his imagination and the flattery of the indigo quart-light the Girl on Fire is smouldering with something over than flames, and she starts to sing, also, her voice more confident, but by no means loud.

The listening becomes like a journey,, and the path is difficult and twisted. Some of the notes slip into flats or chromatics, mistakes that crack Peeta's imaginings and confuse his memories of her.

Because Katniss is dead and gone and now there's only Cato, brutal Cato, with the song escaping from his lips in a tiny, comforting wave that Peeta can stand in without getting wet when what he desires most is to drown, and be swallowed by a tide of the song. Despite the mistakes, the piece continues to move along, sounding different and somehow warmer in this District's accent.

What Cato struggles most with is the left hand. That can be fixed. And the songs can be changed and the words can be re-written but she will never sing the song again. Peeta finds himself joining in, choked by tears that betray his heart.

_Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true_

_Here is the place where I love you._

Here is not the place he loved her. Nor was the Seam, or the arena. He would have loved her in a place far away from the grey, and the crass of home, of Panem. Now, he sings it in mourning, and he needs to. No more wishing or trying to blame. In the song, that's the place her dreams are sweet, where she remains safe, and untainted by the Capitol's florescence.

The silence doesn't register until it's too late, and Cato has turned from the piano, staring at the boy. Peeta's face is red and ruddy with tears. His lips are still parted slightly, ready to sing again, some more, because goodbyes always seem too short and he isn't quite done with love, even if love might be done with him. The piano sits by, quietly, watching them both. Flowers dare to peek from the rubble of it all.

Instead of trying to hide himself, Peeta sniffs. "That was it, yeah."

Cato opens his mouth, and then shuts it. He looks about helplessly, having no clue how to staunch emotional bleeding. He keeps quiet, he always has done, and here's Peeta, challenging it all by feeling so freely and unashamedly.

"My hands were kinda shaky." He tries, striving for the ordinary. The piano suddenly makes him feel a bit nauseous, he feels as if he's stolen something from Peeta and he needs to return it right away. "You want to put me to shame, Loverboy?"

Swallowing again, Peeta wrings his hands because they are heavy, there's too much on his sleeves and it's too much to do with this place. "I should start making lunch." The excuse is silly, but it's something.

For once, Cato seems to hear behind the words. "And some more bread, too?" The boy nods.

He has all but departed when he gets called back. "Hey, 12?"

Peeta sighs. "It's Peeta."

"It's what?"

The Surplus reminds himself of where he is. The embedded time on his wrist is comfortable, now, no longer swollen and sore. It reminds him of His Place, so he says. "It's nothing. What did you need?"

Cato looks at him, edgily. "I loved her first. Remember that." He shuts the lid of the piano. Nothing more is said.

Silent.

These pleasant spaces have become filled with the silent, all dressed in uniform white, with their uniform misery and their melancholia surgically attached. This is what the usual surplus conforms to: the silence, the spangled collars that detail which house they belong to, and the bruises swelling one eye shut or keeping lips purple, which indicates ownership better than anything else.

They go about the square with arms full of sundries and food, heading back with heads down. Some are pulled by masters and their children, cruellest of them all, indeed the most wicked. A few of them are medics, with the green pin on their breast, weaving through the crowds to get here and there. Others, in navy, are private tutors, treated one hell of a lot better than regular domestics. It's illegal to collar them in this District.

Clove knows it's on the cusp of Games season by the influx of Capitol tourists, and their own domesticated Surpluses. She knows because academy students have been starting fights anywhere, all desperate to get the chance to volunteer and bring pride to the District.

Was Clove ever like that? She feels ashamed to think about it. The Games are not as simple as they make out. She would know. She got the first kill.

She comes from the hospital, an enormous, white marble beast with accents of gold lettering. What is all this vaingloriousness down here? Peeta must think they as monsters, living in such opulence with the squalor that rages in his District. Her face becomes hot, and she tries to reason with herself. What does she care what Peeta thinks? He never even thinks to touch her.

Well, then, he can go hand because there's always Cato who is plenty willing to touch her, and what a man, he's a man of wax; Panem's summer has not such a flower.

She thinks about what she's just been discussing, and how she'll have to talk to Cato, Jesus, she's going to have to plan. Thinking about a future trapped here, in an empty house with Cato makes her feel physically heavy, and she stops in the square, taking a bench and watching the marketplace fill.

Back home, he's probably still sleeping and having intensely graphic nightmares over the arena, over all that he's seen. Behind closed doors, Clove hears their whispers against him, and how he's some kind of demon, or monster, unhinged. It isn't right to bring Peeta into that, and it would only be worse to bring in a child.

They thought long and hard about what they were going to do. And Clove would have been swift with it, would have let her future been full of nightmares, because she had sworn she would never offer up more cannon fodder to the Games, not ever. Any child of a victor was always bait. But then, it was Cato, too quiet, too still, like a wrong hushed-up that swayed her.

No more death. It stalks them like a shroud, and would have even more so, but he was gentle, for the first time, and he reasoned with her. 'It's your choice' he reminded her, over and over 'you decide, Clove. You tell me what we're going to do'.

So Clove, shaking with her own tears and concerns for the future and the Games and anybody forced to endure Cato's wrath, let herself feel nothing when she told him just what was happening.

Here she is, watching the teenagers fight and the children tease and the Surpluses, in misery's stead, go, with a small, white envelope tucked under her arm. The shade would make bleach blush, too innocent and divine. But there are no halos inside.

White etchings on the black leave her confused. She feels her face burn just looking at it, feeling for the first time just this movement, in her heart. Like somebody has grabbed her and squeezed her and now it's all coming out in a big wet wad of emotion that's going to choke her. Fearful that she'll cry (for what can only be the third time in her entire life, or so), Clove hides the sonogram in the white, again, so innocuous and sweet.

She thinks about burning it. She thinks about giving it to Cato.

Suddenly, it feels as if everybody is watching her. The rows of windows from the townhouses become like eyes and she feels the need to escape. Maybe they've seen what's inside of the white, it doesn't matter. Everybody will know soon enough, because just like in the Capitol, people believe it's their god-given right to know every detail of their victor's lives, from what they wear to who they fuck.

Clove swallows anything that could move her to feel, and makes herself brief.

She buys flowers, for whatever reason. It makes sense at the time, it saves her from returning empty-handed. They always seem to fill the house, so she buys the ones that are yellow like Cato's hair and then the ones that are blue like Peeta's eyes, and the blue ones are scarcer and much more expensive. They come from outside the District, some variation on Galbana Lillies, that grow where beauty would have no business.

She's about to leave when she sees the knick-knack stall, not exactly a high-end business, but it rolls in and out of the square when the merchant has enough to get himself there. The man is withered and old, with one hand and one stump, that he scratches, watching Clove as her eyes pass over his stock.

One thing in particular catches her fancy.

"This." She says to him, picking up the tiny lion carving, with it's silk tongue and proud scruff. "How much?"

The stump-handed merchant shrugs. "A lovely piece from 12." He explains. "Handmade, too. How's three pieces?"

For whatever reason, she thinks of the forest back in 12 and then she thinks of Peeta, trying to picture him there, or sitting by a fire, whittling away stray bits of wood and cutting up an old, soiled nightdress for the tongue, and the scruff. It has one paw extended, mouth open in a silky raw, so small but fierce and brave and proud.

She could not bear the one Cato had afforded her, with all of the pride sapped from it's raw, it's dignity diminished by the crass method with which it was paid. Clove digs into her purse, avoiding the envelope, and then pulls out a crisp note.

"Here," She says. The merchant looks in disbelief. "Take it, please." She leaves fast, trying to keep her face blank, but so happy and terrified and unsure. She can feel him watching her go the strange girl, the victor, who paid twenty pieces for what everyone else seems to believe it garbage.

Clove near-runs all the way out of town, and then past the academy, with it's wide open doors into the first training hall. From within, the knives clank and maces are thrown. Bows break their strings that children would play, making a symphony of horrors. She pauses, briefly, against a nearby tree, hearing them shout and thinking about the past, and the future.

Here is the place when Cato first met her. It's the place she would spend most of her time, where she can no longer bear to be around. And she swears, with her fingers curled into fists, that she'll send no child of hers to fit in, as another cog in the murder machine.

From behind her, an unfamiliar voice calls out.

"Miss Clove!" She turns, to address the speaker who can be no more than ten, but looks younger, with enormous eyes and gaps in her teeth. The tiny girl runs towards her, from further up the hill, and tears off her backpack. "Miss Clove, are you here to teach?"

Clove shakes her head, leaving the girl crestfallen.

"Oh." Sullenly, the child spits. "Only, your Cato comes to teach swordplay and people said you might come an' teach bout knives."

Clove feels as if there's no oxygen left in the air and she staggers back a bit, unsure of what to say to the girl. She isn't nurturing, she never was, and however ironic, Cato is much better at dealing with kids. Still, those eyes are on her and she has to say something.

"I wouldn't be very good anymore." She says, carefully. "It's been a long time." Of course, to a child, that means nothing, and anybody in this District always seems to revere Clove as this skilled, level-headed victor when really, she's be a memory if she didn't have Cato, who has saved her life in more ways than one. It's that reason she feels like she's betraying her husband every time she looks at Peeta, or think about him, or remembers kissing him.

The child scrambles into her jacket and pulls out a knife, a throwing knife. Something that clove hasn't dared touch since she left the arena, and all of a sudden she feels like Cato had done, earlier, when he'd seen their garden, done to match the arena. The blade winks coyly at her, outstretched, a recognisable evil in the hands of one so innocent, and sweet.

"Please, Miss Clove!" The child pleads. "They say you're the best we ever had,"

With great caution, Clove takes the knife, feeling the weight settle in her hand, and before she has even made a conscious through, she already has the blade pinched between her finger and thumb, as she was always taught, considering the weight and how she should execute the throw. All before a target has even been sought. The hammer grip doesn't work for Clove, s she uses a firm pinch grip and looks down at the child expectantly.

"The tree!" The girl choruses. "Hit right beneath that branch, there."

Clove steps back and re-affirms her pinch grip. For the throw, the weight is shifted to the left foot while the right arm with the knife is brought to the front. Her instructor's voice is present in her head, explaining the throw motion sequence again and again. She can hear the screams and cries of everybody her knife has touched. She hears Cato, at fourteen, wrenching a knife from the table besides him and smirking 'neat trick, Clover. Shame you missed'.

The noise becomes too great. She steps into the throw and lets go of the knife with an evil hiss, then hears a muted thud. When she looks again, the knife is up to the hilt in soft bark, right beneath the branch.

The girl explodes in clapping. Clove can feel herself shaking, all teary, and turns away. "Why are you sad, Miss Clove? Your throw was perfect!"

She walks, but the child follows her, and it's not what she needs right now, a reminder, she needs Peeta with his soft eyes and his clever words and his flowers. She adjusts the cheaper, yellow bouquet and breathes them in.

"No, it's not that." Clove smiles faintly, sniffing.

The girl persists in this subliminal torture. "Come back soon, Miss Clove, you could teach us an awful lot,"

_Teach you about what?_  Clove thinks to herself.  _Teach you how to kill? To lose your soul to the Capitol for sponsors?_

She carries the thought home with her, to the house when darkness Is just setting in. The yellow flowers get put in the sitting room, standing tall for everybody to see, and the oceanic cobalt, the blue flowers like Peeta' eyes sit on her dressing table, watching over the things that make her beautiful but never passing judgement.

She takes one of the yellow flowers from the vase in the sitting room and places it on the stand by Cato's bed, along with the white envelope. It sits, undisturbed.

When she comes downstairs at midnight, her mind furiously trying to scrubs itself of the contents of the envelope, the sonogram, she stops on the stair, alarmed.

The only person downstairs is Peeta, and it's always like that. Cato is a heavy sleeper, he doesn't wake for want of water, or food. There's nobody else in the house. So why can she hear the piano?

The melody is ominous and winding, and she remembers it from being a child. But, then, she sang it innocently, and then when in her teens she'd sing it about Cato, and how she would shimmy out of her bedroom window and down the tree, just too see Cato by the lake, just out of town. There was nothing there but the stars and the water, and she'd murmur the tune as she crept into the clearing, her voice silenced when she found him.

_Strange things did happen here  
No stranger would it be  
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree._

She continues down the stairs and into the sitting room where Peeta plays a quiet, hushed melody on her piano, the one serving a maximum sentence for being timeless. She feels herself first go angry, that the Surplus dares to touch her piano, but then peace. It's the words that strike her _. 'If we met up at midnight_ …' and here they are, with his hands gliding over the soft sharps and flats, and Clove watching, wanting –no, needing, to feel the notes beneath her fingers but afraid, and distant.

He turns his head, the boy, and smiles. The blue of his eyes matches the flowers on her dressing table, rare and precious Galbanna Lillies. But not once does he stop playing, the melody radiating from his skin, and not his lips when he sings or the piano when he plays.

Clove finds herself signing with him in the last verse.  
 _  
_ _Are you, Are you  
Coming to the tree  
Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me.  
Strange things did happen here,  
No stranger would it be,  
If we met up at midnight in the hanging tree._

When the piece finishes, Peeta's hands pull away and then the piano becomes sad, and closed, just like Clove, sitting pretty but having nobody to touch her, or make her sing.

"I used to play that song." She says, at long last. Peeta stands, awkwardly, taller than her but not by much.

"Cato says that you don't play anymore." The words distance them immediately. The mention of Cato makes Clove much more aware of her wedding ring, and of the component embedded in Peeta's wrist.

"Yeah, well." She crosses the room and pulls out the draw in the coffee table. She lifts out a plain white box. "Cato only talks because he likes the sound of his own voice."

Peeta shrugs. "If people only spoke when they had something to say, you think anybody in the Capitol would talk?"

The idea makes Clove laugh, it takes her mind off of the sonogram and the imminence of the Games and the idea of having to go anywhere near the Capitol, to be surrounded by their creepiness, their false generosity and duplicity. She likes this side of Peeta, intelligent and critical and rebellious. He's one of the only people she knows that doesn't believe everything they are spoon-fed by the press.

"No, I guess not." And she hands him the box. "I saw something that reminded me of you today."

She leaves quickly, to let Peeta ruminate over the little lion without asking questions. She cannot fathom into words why it resembles Peeta so, perhaps in it's dignity and courage, how, from one of the hardest places in the world could come something so beautiful. That's the one, Clove thinks. Sic parvis magna: greatness from small beginnings.

Of course, she can't just tell him that in the same way that they can't ever touch. The rules are strict, but unwritten.

It leads her back up the stairs, far too early back into the room where cobalt blue flowers have swollen and left a scent that mixes with her tulip perfume. Clove is all at ease, in deep thought over the lion carving then she enters the room. What winds her is Cato, sat above the sheets with the white envelope in his hands, staring down in deep concentration. She's scared again, she doesn't belong in the situation. There are no knives, no objectives, no targets to hit, and the vagueness overwhelms her.

"Clove." He says, his voice darker than usual. She's too struck to think and just shakes her head, desperately, paling. Will he be angry? Or worse, is he going to react like earlier, with violence and aggression? Instead, Cato actually smiles, warm, and not beautiful, but radiant as the sun. "What's the matter,  _sweetheart_ , Surplus still got your tongue?"

Safe in his joke, Clove spits back. "Same to you,  _darling_. Mom still got your balls?"

He laughs: golden and from his belly, before sitting up a little, and letting his face grow more serious. It makes Clove nervous, makes her want to get away from his eyes, and their curiosity, it makes her want to go back to Peeta, where she can't be held accountable.

"We're good at this, you know." Cato says, carefully. Clove raises her eyebrows, staying firmly by the door, still afraid.

"I'm glad you get so much satisfaction from our lack of meaningful interaction." She smirks, arms akimbo. For the first time in ages, it isn't so strained, she doesn't feel the need to escape under Cato's eyes. They belong, she thinks. Not that she doesn't still want Peeta, but she does have this imperial affinity for Cato.

He scoffs. "Lack?" She nods. "Come over here, Clove."

She crosses the room, and sits on the edge of the bed. "What now, you stupid bastard?" It makes him laugh again.

And Cato could kiss her right now, he could do it, lean in and close the gap and she'd kiss back and he could put his hand on the nape of her neck and she could sigh softly. Cato wants to bite her lip and suck Peeta's name out of her mouth, so it never comes up in conversation. He wants to smell the violets on her skin, and he could right now, but it's not the time, and the moment passes too quick.

"Red makes you look consumptive," He says, just to be difficult, and then Clove is laughing, which she so rarely does thesedays.

"You bought it for me." Clove says, tugging on open of the straps of her nightgown. "And I hate it." Cato leans forward and takes the spaghetti strap between his thumb and finger.

"Maybe you should take it off." He hedges. Clove holds back a laugh.

"Maybe I will." So Cato puts a hand on her shoulder and smooths it down her front, feeling over the heat radiating through the wine-coloured nightgown. There are three layers between them –her dress –the sheets –his clothes. It feels less, and then one of his hands is on her neck and the other has settled on her stomach, and they're kissing like they should be but so rarely do. One of her hands is on his heart, pushing him away all the while deepening and allowing.

His heart rate explodes and he starts to feel the tiniest bit nervous, because Clove feels like a fiery champagne, heaven bottled. She knocks one of his hands away.

"I'm really tired." She sighs, and shoves him away further. There are no questions asked, because there are no words either of them can fathom to aptly consolidate how they feel. She moves away, down to the other end of the bed, shutting off the lamp and leaving the room in darkness.

And not a single word is said on the matter further.


	12. Act 3, Scene 4

One month to the Games.

Clove struggles to sleep because it's only getting hotter and hotter and Peeta is quieter and quieter and the thought of his skin in the night makes her nauseous.

She's been hallucinating Peeta's face at the back of other boys, and they turn around, smiling, with no recognition in their eyes. In her bedroom, on the dresser, the blue flowers sit, and fill the room like a friendly ghost. The house is getting warmer, and soon enough she's spilling out into the garden in the evenings, and during the day when it's too hot. Down by the trees, in front of the twisted metal that Peeta had so carefully reconstructed.

Cato stays inside, and everybody carefully says nothing about it.

She hears him, sometimes, stumbling over a piece of music in the parlour, and it strikes her first as strange. Peeta's a much better player, on all counts. Cato is hamfisted at the best of times, but Jesus Christ, he tries, and eventually the most beautiful little melodies hammer out of the body. It makes her wonder about that piano, and about her, looking pretty, gathering dust, and all of a sudden Cato, of all people, is starting to pick off where once Clove had found so much joy.

The thought drives her up the wall, in this haze of lamplit lemon hair, and blue, blue eyes and it becomes something so dizzy that Clove is unsure if she can stare it in the face. Eventually, she asks, because she can do nothing but.

Cato is in the parlour, struggling over this melody (just the right hand of 'Via Purifico') when she wanders in, fresh from the garden, adjusting the pattern on her dress: silk, from 8, that Cato had brought her, two months after they had been married. It was supposed to be consolation for a particularly nasty fight. As soon as he notices her presence, he stops immediately and moves away from the keys, as if somehow ashamed.

"How is Hades this time of year?" He chides to her. "Met the folks?"

Clove rolls her eyes. "Your wit slays me." And then Cato stands up and moves across the table, to pour himself a glass of water. He sets down on one sofa, and Clove sits across from him, sitting forward, agitated. After a few minutes of stifling silence, Peeta comes in; head bowed, eyes downcast, and fills it up with ice. He murmurs apologies, before withdrawing to the back of the room, and not leaving.

"Cato?"

He looks up at her, with an eyebrow raised. "Clove?" She swallows, trying not to look at Peeta, and failing, as she musters the question on her tongue.

"If you loved me-" She feels herself blushing, and takes another sip, for good measure. Cato, quite thankfully, says nothing. "—and we could never, ever touch…would you eventually get bored…and move on?"

The question sits there in the air for a few minutes, and when Clove looks up she can feel Peeta's gaze, inquisitive and shy, on her. It's not unwelcome, but Cato's answer makes her nervous, and she has no idea what to do with herself while he ruminates. The man in question sets down his glass, with this coy smile, shaking his head and laughing, quietly.

"If I loved you?"

Clove coughs. "Yeah."

Cato runs a finger along the stem of the glass, drawing in air before he finally looks at Clove. "Then I'd love you in any way I could." But, of course, Clove isn't looking at him. Her dizzy mind if fixed on the sight behind him, the boy with sandy hair and blue eyes like Galbanna Lillies, who plays with hands gentler than his own. She seems lost, ignoring his words.

But Cato continues. "And if we couldn't touch, I'd only have to look at you, Clove." She looks at Peeta, who finally looks back, and he nods, he looks at her and Clove has to wonder. She remains completely death to all that Cato says to her. "If I lost my sight, I'd have you talk to me, always, about the contents of your thoughts."

Clove drops her eyes, but she can still feel that boy, staring down at her.

"And if I couldn't hear I'd have you near me, so that I could feel you, until I died, Clove, until I had to wake up again to look for you." His voice is weaker and more shy, so unlike him in many ways but also so fitting. Cato look at her for some kind of response, or direction, he so desperately wants to know if he has done right and Clove is still looking at Peeta.

"Clove?"

She shrugs, and gets up again. "Forget it."

For the time being, the romantic gesture is lost on Clove. The water in her glass seems far too bitter, and unsubstantial, too. The only reason Cato lets her go was because he knows, just as well as Peeta, that it will not be her last glass.

Three weeks to the Games.

The bedroom feels far too hot. It's a combination of the season: the sweltering summers they have always enjoyed here, in this part of Panem, and Clove's position, sweating through the nightgown and beneath the blankets and tucked under one of Cato's enormous arms. As usual, he's already asleep, his face unreadable making nightmares undetectable until the second before they strike, like lightning.

There are still a few scars hinted at across his cheeks. Flecks of white, here and there, so small that nobody would ever guess. They always remark on it in the Capitol, and it's not that Clove isn't aware of how beautiful he is. He's strong and charming and witty, too, even if sometimes he seems to forget. It's easy, she knows, to fall in love with Cato for that, because he's not good at talking to her, he doesn't know how to say, and it drives him to anger.

That's not his fault. Clove isn't blaming him. But then she'll see Peeta, with his jokes, and the right words for everything and it makes her so—Christ, so angry but to enamoured all at once. This upsetting mixture of infatuation and regret.

Why is it always a mixture?

She can't sleep because she's thinking about that piano, and how Peeta touches it and not her. She can't sleep because the room is so hot, and even though it's been a few weeks since she first felt it, but that flutter inside of her is still strange and she's not sure if she likes it. That, alone, is Cato's fault, and she blames him because she feels nothing else on the matter. Having the baby isn't exactly a million-dollar idea, but neither was getting married, or volunteering, or being born in this District. It would seem everything so far has been a string of ill choices.

From downstairs, she hears Peeta shuffle out into the parlour and lift the piano lid. He starts to play in a Dorian minor, and she knows the song because she used to sing it. The melody has her asleep before she knows it, listening to the baker but being tucked in the victor's arms, smelling his skin, and feeling his lips in her hair whilst her body sighs and her brain chants 'wrong wrong wrong'.

She starts to dream, too.

 _The melody winds down on the wind, and Clove can feel blood on her wrists. It begins, as all dreams do, in the middle of everything, and she has no recollection of how she came_ _to be here or why she is. It's stifling in the dream, too, and when she finally looks around there are fires, but in particular, the house, going up in such smoke. The windows belch soot and vomit flickering orange at her._ _  
_ _  
Her hands are bound. She realises it, suddenly, behind her back, they have her wrists held together in some kind of rope and when Clove tries to get up, and run towards the house where she's suddenly so scared Peeta is, or Cato might be, she falls into the grass and starts to scream bloody murder._ _  
_ _  
She feels hands on her. A blade against her neck as Clove is heaved to standing again._ _  
_ _  
"Peeta-" She sobs, deliriously. "Where's Peeta?" Her assailant heaves her, with a sharp tug of the hair and the blade nips part of her neck. Clove loses it again and starts to screech, frantically. "Cato!" He always saves her, he's never too late, but then she hears this strangely familiar laugh. It's female, and then all of a sudden Clove is spun around to face whoever it is that wants her dead._ _  
_ _  
"He can't save you!" The girl hisses. Then, she laughs, and spits. Clove blinks, furiously struggling, screaming out profanities. She realises suddenly, all too suddenly, that the girl is from 12. The girl is Katniss._ _  
_ _  
"Peeta-" But it does her no good._ _  
_ _  
Katniss lines the blade up to her throat again and whispers, too amused, too bitter "Wanna blow Loverboy one last kiss?" She laughs, maniacally. By the hair, she drags Clove to the moth of the cornucopia, still a good seven metres in the air, where they've fixed a noose to the lip of the horn by a long, twisted spike of metal. It seems even higher in her dream, distorted, and the noose is at the length to break a neck._ _  
_ _  
_ _Are you, Are you_ _  
Coming to the tree_ _  
Wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me?_ _  
_ _  
Peeta is stood up_ _top;_ _his hands bound similarly, a noose already sitting pretty like a necklace around his throat._ _When he sees Clove, being dragged towards the cornucopia, he goes to call out but is silenced. Others, Clove can see, standing around wand watching. They are not here by a happy accident. Each one of them, from the ages of twelve to eighteen, small and sly to colossal, are all dead. They were all killed by Cove, or Cato's hand, and now, they seem to want some reversal._ _  
_ _  
But what did Peeta do?_ _  
_ _  
_ _Clove gets handed roughly from tribute to tribute under they stand her at the top of the cornucopia next to Peeta. They shake so violently, despite the heat. Clove watches the house burn, watching the piano burn with it, and she hopes that the flames will catch and devour her._ _  
_ _  
She can't even reach out to touch Peeta's hand. She can't even touch him now, in this nightmare._ _  
_ _  
"You came." He whispers, this oxymoronic smile ghosting across his face. Clove manages to choke out a response. She might repeat herself, a little louder, if a voice from below doesn't interrupt her. It's then that the image is completed, they slip a noose around her throat, too, tightening it, and Clove can't help but think he looks so good in blue; she can't help but be thankful to die by his side._ _  
_ _  
"We charge you with the_ _abetted_ _murder of your patron." A small girl in a gossamer gown, who is twelve but her looks are more of a_ _t_ _en-year-old, starts. She addresses Peeta, and even now, he refuses to be shaken. At first, Clove feels a bit safer, but then the words sink in. She steps away from him, shakily._ _  
_ _  
"But-" She stammers, choked by her own understanding. "You hurt Cato-" None stop to listen to her._ _  
_ _  
"How do you plead?" Peeta swallows._ _  
_ _  
"I did it for love." But nobody cares to listen to a dead man. Already, he's a corpse._ _  
_ _  
"We find you guilty." The girl says, with no actual emotion in her voice._ _And then she turns to Clove. "How do you plead?"_ _  
_ _  
She starts to feel faint, and Christ, crucified Christ, where's Cato? She needs him. The house is burning and she cannot breath and Peeta is going to die but Cato is nowhere, that beautiful, brilliant man cannot save her as he has done before and this is all of her fault. "Cato!" She wails, anyway. "Please –Cato-"_ _  
_ _  
That one from 12, Girl on Fire, snaps. "He can't save you!" She screams "You murdered him!"_ _  
_ _  
It cuts deeper and worse than any vorpal blade. Then comes the staggered onslaught of thought. "No…" Clove shakes her head, furiously. "No, I love him!" Peeta turns to her, his face fixed in betrayal and horror and he shakes his head back at her._ _  
_ _  
"It's too late, Clove." They take him, tightening the noose, offering the blindfold. He shakes his head, and smiles at her, even though there is blood coming from his eyes because he is no fucking scared. "I want to look at you until we die."_ _  
_ _  
Somebody takes Clove, and tightens her own rope necklace. The little girl from eleven speaks again._ _  
_ _  
"We find you, too, guilty of the abetted murder of your husband. We sentence you to death."_ _  
_ _  
Clove feels the fire on her face. They push Peeta, first. She follows him._ _  
_ _  
_ _(_ _Strange things did happen here, no stranger would it be_ _…_ _if we met up at midnight in the hanging tree…_ _)_ _  
_ _  
_When Clove opens her eyes there are tears blinding her. She feels as if her lungs are on fire, and all that she exhales is carbon monoxide. It's too hot and she's too scared to think, to even exist. That occasional flutter in her tummy is drowned out by the hammering in her chest and the backflips her stomach has taken to.

"Clove?"

She leans across the side of the bed and vomits, her body shaking as some kind of toxin leaves her. The hands on her back come as an unwelcome surprise and she screams out, this piercing whimper, kicking n=and fighting until she's surrounded by a safe, familiar pair of arms.

"Come on." Cato says, his voice gentle. She breaks down into a hysterical fit of sobs, relieved to have him here, and scared by all that she's seen and confused about what the dream is saying of Peeta. It's another dizzy truth she can't quite stare in the face yet. "Come on, you're fine,"

"I'm sorry." She gets out, breathless with indignation. "I'm so-"

"You don't have to be sorry." He assures her. Cato's awfully good at this, really, comforting and all of that. He's never been a particularly emotional person, but somehow Clove feels safe. It's enough to have him alive, she thinks, but to have him  _loving_ , which he so rarely is, all loving with his head on her shoulder and his chest against her back, is more than enough. She can feel his heart through his chest, and he uses his thumb to rub small circles onto her stomach. "Bad dream?"

Clove furiously wipes at her eyes. She nods, once. "Uh-huh,"

Cato nods in understanding. "Arena?" She nods, and he makes another soft noise of understanding. "I'll have the Surplus get you a glass of-" But Clove grabs him and doesn't let go.

"Please," She sniffs. "Stay."

Three weeks to the Games, and she's already screaming.

Two weeks to the Games, and the party begins.

It's something to celebrate, in this District. A chance at bringing pride and honour that no child here could turn down. They train, furiously, and Clove is finally part of this adult society, where they stay in stylish rooms and drink from silly glasses and discuss lukewarm topics, hinting at the fact that their children are going to win, that they have bet on the right volunteer. All before the reaping.

It's a chance to prepare for the awful company in the Capitol, at least. It's hosted by whoever has the most influence, she supposes, which thankfully isn't them. Cato goes off, is called off, into a sea of party guests with quirky fears, ready to discuss his strategy and pick scabs. He sees no problem with heartlessly abandoning Clove to these strangers. She'll get him for it.

It's funny how he works. Cato is usually quite a physical person, he likes to touch, and to tell Clove without having to talk. It's Peeta that has the problem with touch, but would go to her in a minute if something terrible happened. And, how ironic, Cato, who has never had a problem with touch in his life, can so rarely muster the gall to hold her when others are watching. Love her in any way he could, indeed.

She's acrimonious over this at the corner of the room when a voice interrupts her thought.

"Bitter much?" She turns to see a Surplus with a tray of small, antiseptic green chocolates, looking at her expectantly. Clove blushes, gritting her teeth.

"Excuse me?" She's ready to slap the Surplus to remind him of His Place when he continues.

"The sweets taste sweeter with the bite of the bitter." Clove coughs, trying to find Cato in the sea of people, unhappy at being left adrift with her best company as a Surplus. She never liked parties like this in the first place, and how she has to bother with making an impression. The gossip is all about them tonight, her stylist has reminded her, and they have Clove in this hideous floor-length red number that makes her look more drowned than pregnant.

Still, it's an easy way of making conversation with the more vacuous and vapid ones.

"How…" Clove takes a little green sweet from the ray and places it under her tongue, avoiding the too-heavy taste that most of this imported Capitol food bears. "…quaint." She finished, unsure how offensive she's allowed to be tonight. It might be a good idea to get it all out now instead of leaving it boiling over in the Capitol. The Surplus nods, and goes to depart.

"A minute." Clove ushers him back. "Our hosts." She looks at the boy, no more than nineteen, but looking more boyish. "They're your patrons?" He nods.

"Yes, miss." It serves as an answer.

"And how are they involved in the Games?" He nods.

"Head Gamemaker this year." The boy smiles to himself, this corkscrew-turning kind of malicious look painting his features.

"Anything good?" Clove regrets asking it as soon as she gets her answer.

The Surplus laughs. "I assure you, Miss Clove, you'll find it  _simply unforgettable_."

Elsewhere, Cato comes to the same conclusion. He starts another flute of champagne and tries to ignore the conversations around him.

It's all going well enough until he sees a slim arm dart out from behind him and select a glass from the tray on the table. From just left of his ear, a woman speaks.

"I'm sure you don't mind me," The woman says, in a warm voice. "I simply cannot get enough of this Pernod-Ricard." She comes to Cato's side and takes a long sip. The woman looks about twenty-six or so, with dark brown hair pulled away from her face. Not unlike dissociation, her face has been bleached to be paler, and her lips are an unfading blood-red.

"Not at all." He says, cordially, moving aside. She moves with him, like a shade.

"Victoria Heavensbee." She extends a tiny hand that Cato could quite easily crush if he shook too hard. Her nails are long, and just as red as her lips. "My husband is the head gamemaker this year." Cato makes a noise of understanding, and Victoria laughs. "Oh, well I'm sure you already knew that much." He tries to smile. "Are you here to bask in the glory of your previous win?" Victoria laughs again.

Cato swallows. "Not intentionally," This is true. "I'm sure this year's winner has much more to look forward to," This is not. Still, the Heavensbee woman seems to care none at all and flicks her wrists, apparently delighted by the comment.

"Bask away, by all means." The sincerity of her speech dries up suddenly. "I'm sure you deserve to."

"Thank you." Cato says, sharply. Victoria looks around the room.

"Be sure to tell your wife that I congratulate her, too." Then, her eyes flick back to Cato. They seem all too set on something nobody else can see. As if she's hyper-aware that people could overhear them. "And my blessings, too. I heard it on the grapevine that you're expecting."

Cato, only half-listening, frowns. "Expecting what?" The woman breaks out into hideous laughter.

"You are quite something. By and by, I need another glass at this rate." Cato turns to get her one, and by the time he's facing the woman again, Victoria is on her tiptoes, leaning up to whisper to him.

"What-" He manages, but Victoria cuts him off.

"There's a storm coming, Cato." She whispers, this utter cold in her voice. In the crowd of people, Cato suddenly feels so invisible, and removed. Her hand feels impossibly heavy on his shoulder. "You and your friends better batten down the hatches."

He spies Clove in between people, looking so lost, and helpless. Will the storm reach her, too? Victoria laughs.

"It's due any day now, and when it hits, it hits  _hard_." Her lips get pressed against the shell of his ears and it takes all of Cato's nerve not to bat her away. "You're going to wonder how you lived so large and left so little for the rest of us." Her voice is furious. Through gritted teeth, she speaks, like a serpent, and then Victoria drops back onto her feet with a cold smile.

As she walks away, Cato just hears her say. " _Let the Games begin_."

Two weeks to the Games, and the party has begun.


	13. Act 3, Scene 5

_(Warnings for sex)_

It's two nights before the Games.

And that midnight, conversations take place that are necessary.

There are no more songs, Peeta is all out of melodies and they have to move on. It's not the time, anyway, not with the Games looming, not with Clove knowing that whatever happens, she's going to have to watch some hapless thing pipe it's way to glory, or the grave.

So, they find themselves drinking tea in a silence, with the remnants of Clove's makeup sticking under her eyes and making her look tired. She is tried, though. Of everybody. Of the Games, that she really thought she had escaped.

They never really got free. That little stunt, that threat with the double-suicide? Nobody threatens the Capitol like that, nobody makes a fool of the Gamemakers and ever gets to live very long.

Clove thinks of that one from 12, that won the last Quarter Quell by using the forcefield at the edge of the arena. A hideous alcoholic, with what left? Not long since dead anyway. She wonders if that'll happen to her, or Cato, if the Capitol decide to retaliate with murder.

Oh God, her body goes numb. Jesus Christ, who would they take from her? Cato? Peeta, or worse still, and then Clove tries not to think anymore, it hurts too much, and she can't sleep anyway.

Their conversation goes like this:

"Do you miss home?" Clove speaks first. She wets her lips, and waits for the answer. Peeta looks as he always does always so steady. It comforts her that he's that way, like furniture of the heart. The boy looks up at her, his face still a little purple from Cato's episode in the garden, but youthful and untouchable.

He considers himself. "I thought I would." His voice is soft, and older than himself, with an age deeper than years. "I thought it'd really get to me, but it hasn't." To think of him as happy here makes Clove smile. "I expected to have patrons that I hated."

Intrigued, Clove leans forward. "And do you hate us?"

Peeta is brave. "No, I don't." He assures her. Their conversations are always calm, which is nice, but almost disappointing. Clove loves the way Cato riles her, and winds her up but she'll never ever say it to him and give him that victory. "I feel sorry for you."

She laughs mirthlessly. "Yes, poor Cato, with his expensive house and his money and his pick of Capitol whores-" Peeta opens his mouth to speak, and then closes it, and then finally decides to select a few words. Clove doesn't mean to shout at him, or even to shout, but she's scared that she'll lose even one of them, and she's no good on her own, only, Christ,  _she won't be alone, will she..?  
_  
"I didn't mean-" He begins, quietly. Clove waves a hand, as if trying to bat away the conversation.

"Save it." She says, and then swallows, knowing she'll have to say it, because Peeta isn't going to, he isn't always so honest. Neither of them want to either, the notion is so horrible that it robs her of all of her grace. "Look, Peeta-"

"I'll come back." He says to her. They still never touch, and at a moment like this Clove would like nothing more than to reach out and hold one of his hands, or curl up next to the baker that smells of flowers. They both know that she can't, and there's always Cato,, sleeping upstairs, that makes her feel too conflicted to move.

"You can't know that." Clove counters. She hates this conversation. She hates the Games, and she wants it all to burn, because she's not usually like this, it makes her obnoxious, it makes her hateful and she doesn't mean to be, not to Peeta, not even to Cato. What is it with him that makes her act like this?

Peeta looks down at the table, and then up again. "It's the Quell." He says, calmly. "They won't pick just anybody if they want a good show." For a second, Clove lets herself smile. At least, for now the feeling is good. She knows that the sweet will turn bitter all too quickly if his name ends up on a cursed slip of white paper.

"But if they do-" Clove sighs, closing her eyes.

"If they do?" When she looks up, Peeta is smiling at her.

"Well, if that happens-" She begins. Peeta has a habit of interrupting.

"It won't happen." She glares at him.

"But if it does-"

"Which it won't." Peeta grins.

"Why'd you kiss me?" It knocks all of the wind from Peeta's metaphorical sails and he so isn't expecting it, making that smile on his face change suddenly into this open-mouthed guilt. Like he's been caught out at something which is ridiculous because Clove was the one he was kissing and it wasn't a crime (not unless crimes of passion count, and even then, Clove's only real crime of passion is not realising the passion that Cato has for her).

He's blushing now, and he won't look at her. It annoys clove to no end, but what can she do? Peeta is a Surplus, and he's just some boy. She can't expect him to be so forward, not with that component in his wrist, and not with Clove sitting in front of him, the wedding ring glistening on the hand that smooths over her swollen stomach.

"Why did you let me?" He counters, weakly. Clove laughs out loud, shaking her head. Peeta lets out a breath, as if at last feeling safe.

"I asked first." She says, just because, and Peeta plays along because he's terrified of having to be serious with her about this, he cannot say in words why he had closed the gap between them. But instead, he says

"My question is more urgent." You can see it on his face, Peeta thinks he's won for a second, and Clove wants to slap him but she also wants something else that she can't ask for, and there they are again, sitting in this comfortable silence and thinking, because between them thinking is safe and fine and it counts as fidelity, physically. It's ironic, Clove thinks, that both her and Cato are rubbish at adultery and fidelity. They both should just choose one and stick to it.

"I should-" Clove sighs, she feels her face heat up as she speaks. She gestures to the door. "I should probably head back up. I'll need some sleep if I-"

Peeta shakes his head at her. "Clove." He says, and then when she won't look he speaks again. "Clove, calm down." Because he can see that she's shaking a little and her eyes are all shrunken with fear. It's okay to be afraid, Peeta has lived most of his life afraid. So, when he tries to calm her, he means everything he says. "Cato won't get picked. They're not going to do that."

She wipes at her face and sucks in a breath. "God, Peeta-" Her voice sounds too pathetic and small. She tries to iron out the creases in it. "Like you said, it''s the Quell." She sniffs. "They won't pick just anybody if they want a good show."

Peeta sighs, and he looks around for some kind of help, but Clove's opinions are law, and now he's rendered useless by the feeling, the cold creeping into the room like a swarm of spiders, free to crawl all over his legs and neck and face.

"Even if he did get reaped, Clove," Peeta begins, looking up at her. "He'd still have a good chance of winning. He'd still be able to get home."

Out of nowhere, Clove says. "I'm sorry."

It takes Peeta by surprise, which is rare. He's too steady, almost, he knows the worst outcomes of most situations, but this one is unscripted and more heartfelt because of it. " For what?" Clove laughs, miserably.

"You told me about your nightmare, about getting reaped." She pushes her hair out of her eyes. "And I laughed at you." She takes a breath, but Peeta perceives it as waiting a beat for some kind of morbid punchline. "I shouldn't have laughed at you. I shouldn't have done that." Her voice is barely audible.

Peeta considers his words, again, like counting cards, somehow cheating at the conversation. "I kissed you because I wanted to, Clove." His gaze in unwavering, and Clove could stare forever, but this tiny kick jolts her from her inertia, and reminds her who's side she should be on.

Without another word to her name, Clove sets her cup down onto the table. She notices the tall jug of water, from where she'd sipped as Cato answered her question, and he crime of passion comes back to her, not realising what Cato had actually said. It hits her in sudden waves, and she's drowning, unable to surface under all that she had ignored when she was staring at Peeta. " _If I lost my sight, I'd have you talk to me, always, about the contents of your thoughts.".._.Oh, God, he had been so careful with his words and Clove had tossed them aside so heartlessly.

So cannot linger when she realises it. Instead, she nods to the Surplus, this tiny, unprepared boy, who she'll wave off in the morning.

Clove heads upstairs in the darkness and back into the warm bedroom, where there are different flowers. The Galbanna Lillies needed somewhere different to bloom, so the yellow ones watch her from the bedside table now. The smell isn't so strong, and they aren't so beautiful, but she likes them.

She sits on the edge of the bed for a very long time and watches Cato, in his sleep. It his her that she has forgotten to say out loud how beautiful Cato is to her. Her perfect match, because they shout and scream and claw at eachother, but she needs him, like she needs the sunrise and the oxygen in the air. She doesn't want him to leave her, and render her useless. Maybe she doesn't tell him, because it;'s hard enough, but she loves him, more than she can actually rationalize to words.  _Please_ , she wants to grab him and scream,  _please don't leave me_.

Of course, Clove doesn't do that. She remains where she is a little longer, wondering about him. He looked younger under the stars of the arena. They called him vicious and cruel, and for the longest time Clove believed them. When the first nightmare hit, that image fell to bits because Cato was shaking and crying and holding onto her so  _damn tight_ , not letting go...

She likes him best when he's vulnerable. That's when he's the Cato that saved her, down by the Cornucopia, during the feast. Only then is he so honest and caring. Usually, he plays it aloof and cool, which is ironic because he is the more emotional of the two of them.

Lost in her reverie, she doesn't notice when Cato is staring back at her. When he speaks, she flinches a damn mile.

"What?" Clove asks, embarrassed.

"I said, didn't your mother ever tell you that if you stare like that, your eyes'll roll clean out?" In the half-darkness, with cracks on the moon showing through the blinds Clove can make out this unmistakable smile, that suits Cato in every way, stupid and cocky and ridiculous. His face is dark but his eyes penetrate the darkness and speak in angel wings.

Clove wants to say something equally stupid and meaningless back, but she can't. If she opens her mouth, everything she feels will come out in this unintelligible wad of emotion and that wouldn't be fair on Cato.

He sits up slowly, and leans towards her. "You're shaking."

She tries to play it cool. "I'm just cold." She says. Cato creeps forward some more, and takes one of her hands.

"Your hands are like ice."

Clove wrestles her hand away and looks anywhere but Cato. He isn't going to catch her afraid, she won't let him. "Drop it," She tries to warn him, but her voice is starting to shake a little, and Jesus Christ, she's not going to cry in front of him, that would be the worst.

He pulls her towards him, incredibly strong still, maybe even stronger. "Your face is white, Clove." And then all of a sudden her resolve breaks and she buries herself into his shoulder, breathing in his smell and trying to memorize everything about Cato, just in case. He is baffled for the shortest of moments, his arms lifted in shock, but then he understands, and drops one against the small of her back.

"Hey," He laughs, trying to peel her away. "I'm not dead yet, sweetheart." Usually, she's have his guts for calling her sweetheart or using some clever line but God, she knows that she wouldn't be able to function a day without one. Clove tried to assemble what's left of her dignity when she sits up, pushing her hair out of her face again.

"I'm sorry." She breathes, grappling about for an excuse. The lie occurs to her as she tells it. "S'just hormones." And then Cato finds the temerity to laugh at her in this lilac half-darkness. He laughs loud and golden and Clove's face turns dark. She shoves him, but Cato is far too big to notice.

"Sorry," he says, breathless. "Please don't choke me in my sleep."

Clove narrows her eyes. "I'll think about it." She expects him to make another joke or say something meaningless and stupid but he's never been very predictable and instead he moves back a little, taking all of her in. It's one of the only things that Clove thinks is normal about their relationship: she knows that she finds him attractive. And she doesn't think Cato thinks she's ugly. At least, she hopes not. His eyes pass over her and he smiles.

"C'mere." He says, slowly, wetting his lips with his tongue. Clove knows that look, and it makes her feel something different from either lust and love. He keeps looking at her with that damned smile and she wants him just as much, she can feel herself weakening with it. "I said some here, Clove."

Steadily, she crawls from the edge of the bed, until he knees are either side of his waist. Now there are only two layers between them, and they both desire to be closer, to be much more intimate, and here it's allowed, there are no eyes prying, no blue flowers on her dressing table. Under Cato's hand, she forgets Peeta completely, she disregards his kiss, trades it for another.

Oh, Christ, crucified Christ, Cato feels good and his eyes are closed in this gentle concentration, finding her lips in the way one greets an old friend, with fondness, with such expertise. Clove forgets the rest of the world gladly, forgets the Games like they are some dull rumor of another war because right now it's just her and Cato, together, and it doesn't matter if everything burns, she wants to die here.

One of his hands drops onto her back, it moves up with the deepening of the kiss, his short nails scratching desperately, clawing and she loves it, she wants him to never let go. The other is curled around the nape of her neck, keeping her close to him, disallowing distance between them that has become such a casual criminal offense.

Needing air, Clove breaks away. "I'll let you breathe in a minute," she promises him. Cato's eyes are dark with pleasure and his lips are slightly parted in breathlessness but he looks happy like he hasn't in so long. They both need this. A physical manifestation of all they fought for.

Cato brushes her hair over her ear with a steady arm. "I'm good." He says to her, with this sideways smile. She takes him at his word.

His kisses rove lower, ans soon enough he's nipping and biting at her collar and her neck and Clove doesn't care about the games that they play, she gasps out and curls her toes, her body going taught as a bowstring and as electric as a live wire. She can hear Cato chuckle in victory as he leaves a few telltale dark marks on her shoulders. God, Clove hasn't felt like this in so long, and she tugs at the short pieces in the back of Cato's hair, ripping and letting out tiny cries.

For a second, he leans over her, to the nigthstand, and Clove wonders if he's going to leave her like this, sweating through her silk and begging him, because he's done that before. But he's merciful tonight and instead Cato flips open a small switchblade. She regards it with fear, at first, but Cato just grins, easing her onto her back, with the blade between his teeth.

"Cato-" She says, nervously. He takes it with his hand.

"Do you trust me?" His voice is devious.

Clove shakes her head. "No."

But instead of hurting her, he runs the knife along the side of her nightgown and cuts it away, before pulling from the side, and having it come away completely. The silk is frayed and ruined and it leaves Clove laying there in her underwear, frozen. In a second, Cato tosses the knife aside and goes for her.

In a second, Clove is naked, pinned by Cato's hand a few inches from her ear, and the other one on her hip. His kissing is fickle, it goes from gentle to biting and never in one place very long. Clove doesn't acre if she wakes up the damn Capitol, this is exactly what she needs, this is what has been missing and she throws her head back and groans, looking for more, looking for Cato in this strange ethereal darkness and finding him.

Her sounds only intensify when Cato's lips go lower, at first making her whimper as he swirls his tongue, raising her nipples to hard, pink peaks before suckling and he knows exactly what he's doing because it only makes Clove scream out more, thumping him on the back with her fist, and then dragging her nails back up, drawing blood in her absolute lust. It's good, too good, and she's trembling terribly, static but also electric with all of this want, and her eyes are squeezed shut.

He thinks not a second about himself. God, Clove curls her toes again and wonders how he came to be so generous and perfect and – _Christ, yes, just like this._

In the midst of the chaos, she can feel the unmistakable sensation of his hands, and Jesus Christ, he knows Clove too well, because she's soon sobbing with pleasure, too ready, wanting more, wanting the moon on a string and right now if she asked Cato for his eyes he would crawl to fetch her a scalpel.

Their eyes meet. Clove is sweating and trembling and Cato remains, as always, so collected and practiced and smirking. He waits until she nods, her eyes slipping shut again and her hips bucking up. It's then that he co-ordinates, places his hands on either side of her hips and moves into her in one slow but definite motion.

Clove lets out a pleasured, tormented sob.

Cato searches her face for pain, he asks permission with her eyes and she takes a second, breathing, growing accustomed to the sensation, before giving him another nod. He starts out slow, fighting the urge to claim her completely and it doesn't take so long before Clove's fingernails are back to scratching and her body is taught with pleasure once more and she's gasping into his ear.

He thrusts his hips and her rise to meet him and he bites her neck again to try to quiet the noises that are tumbling out his mouth. It's too late because Clove knows, she matches them with her own. Only, Jesus Christ, she's not soft or gasping, she's  _wailing_  and tugging at his hair.

Soon enough she's hanging by her fingernails because something has uncoiled in the pit of her stomach and it's all so sudden but perfect, he's just-so and fast, now, the hair in his fringe sagging with sweat and swishing back and forth as he goes. His movements become more urgent and her cries more insistent.

Clove's eyes snap open as she goes, crying out for Cato, and only Cato, the name of the other blonde slipped from her mind and her tongue and her body. He follows her in a matter of seconds, grunting through his orgasm until he's watching her twitch in the sweaty sheets, still trembling, but noticeably calmer.

He tucks her back into him, and Clove falls asleep fast with her body curled into his, like a cracked piece of glass lining itself back up. It reminds him of wanting her, during the Games, longing to reach out and kiss her but knowing that there, all eyes were upon them.

She has no dreams, and niether does Cato. But it takes him a while to get to sleep, with this enormous smile on his face.

Everybody knows it: Cato loves to win. He loves to be reminded that Clove wants him more than the unflappable Surplus who is apparently flappable after all, because he loves to win.

And, as usual when celebrating a win, the universe is quick to get even.


End file.
